Playground of the Mind

Back in the saddle

2009-02-06T11:06:00.004-05:00

So this week brought me a chance to raid again. Have found a group that seems to be pretty decent at it while not being a frothing at the mouth "raiding is a job, not a past time" type of guild. My son and I got to enjoy a night of running Naxx and Sarth. He even walked off with 3 shiny new purples to enhance the tanking experience. So I, once again found my poor kitty forced to heal. It's not that I don't mind healing, I just find myself stuck with the mantra that 3.1 and dual talent spec's can not get here fast enough because I don't know how much longer my (virtual) wallet can take this.

Bought a tavern last night in Fable 2. Commence virtual money baths.

Last few weeks have had me itching for a LAN party. My computer room isn't set up yet but I'm thinking I might have to forgo that and just make room for everyone. I think I have the space, just take some creativity. And I'm all about thinking outside the box when it comes to facilitating gaming.

Speaking of gaming, I'm officially heading to GenCon this year in Indy. Love to meet folks there. Look me up. I'll be the guy with the "I can't believe I finally made it here" look on my face.

News flash: Hard instances are hard!

2009-01-29T12:36:00.003-05:00

So got the day off of work yesterday. Spent time with my RL guild (family). Watched a movie. Finally put my new TIVO to use. Yeah, yeah I was late to the windows craze too. I'm finally sporting 2 80's and getting to know all the top end stuff. I haven't been to a raid yet but I've been having problems getting functional heroic groups together. Bad pulls, broke healers, PUGs from hell. I do have a solid group but, lately, we haven't been able to get together and apparently my birthday wish of my 2 younger kids growing old enough overnight to sport 4/5th's of a solid 5 man is apparently going unanswered. So I plod along at my own pace, gear wish-list grasped firmly in my right hand. In truth I'm having fun crafting and spending my days in Wintergrasp (holy crap is this place 2 tons of fun in a 1 pound bag).

Other than WoW haven't had much time for other games. Still tooling around with Left 4 Dead. Tried my first competitive game the other day and having players control the zombies added some nice unpredictability to the game. I still recommend this to anyone looking to pick up a new shooter.

What you plan and what takes place ain't always the same thing...

2009-01-05T08:30:00.002-05:00

Watched Serenity again last night...marry me Joss Whedon. Marry me and regale me with stories of Mal and crew to me for the rest of my life. I can't think of anything that would make me happier than more storrys of the crew of Serenity.

Anyway back to the gaming front. I've gotten to finally spend sometime playing Left4Dead. L4D is probably the best new shooter I've played since BF1942. I'm truly enjoying the co-op multiplayer game from Valve. If you haven't gotten a chance to try it, take my recommendation and get a post Christmas gift for yourself. You won't be disappointed.

On the Warcraft front I've almost reached 80 and over and over again have been so impressed with how this expansion has turned out. I honestly can't say enough about how great leveling has been. Some truely great story moments.

My little boy's all grown up...

2008-12-22T11:17:00.003-05:00

So yesterday I had a friend stop by and we'd been visiting for a while when my son comes up and asks me to come help with violet hold that they'd lost a dps'er and were in need of one to finish up. I hadn't done VH yet so it sounded interesting to me. My friend and I were about done, he was leaving so I grabbed my druid and logged in. From the first pull I was concerned because all of the mobs were orange to me...which meant they were orange to my son the tank as well. For the non-initiated here that means that spells won't land and melee have a harder time hitting them. Now the other three in the group were not overpowered, they were just about the right level range. We wiped on the first boss because my son didn't understand that he had to kite the guy around. Fair enough, it was his first time as well but we came back and downed the guy, then the next two bosses after that to win the instance. I have to confess here I didn't think we stood a chance of winning given the levels of the mobs but I have to hand it to my healer as well as my son. Job well done, loot in hand we left the dungeon (yes I got an upgrade I can't wear yet, lol) and a good time was had by all.

Point is I had to stop and reflect at this point that my 13 year old son really held it together. Sometimes he really finds ways to irritate me (both in game and out) but then he gives me a glimpse of patience and determination that give me hope for the great gamer he's turning out to be. Yeah yeah, adult too I guess.

On that note I have to say how much I've totally enjoyed playing Wrath. I'm still getting used to my home on a RP server but I've enjoyed my times RPing, raiding, making new friends and, in general, just playing the game. Yeah, I'm not 80 yet but I've been taking it slow and smelling the flowers. Wrath is a huge love letter to the casual gamer. If you take the time to read the quests and really dig into the story there's a lot of satisfaction to be had. Thanks Blizzard for probably the best MMO experience I've had since I first discovered the genre.

The Lich King has fixed his gaze upon me and my lawyer says I don't like being stalked...

2008-11-13T08:28:00.002-05:00

So, sadly flying my gamer colors, I stood in line at midnight last night. No, I didn't take time off from work to recover today because I'm leaving for vacation tomorrow. So today? Yeah, I'm payin for that. Not quite the spring chicken I used to be.

So this is basically just a couple quick impressions, I'll try and follow up some more when I get back from warmer climates.

My install went smooth but at 1am not as fast as I'd have liked. Patched 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 again and I was back in the saddle. I am bound and determined unlike BC to really absorb this patch more than plowing through it. I have 6 70's so there's plenty of time to burn through content later on. My first couple trips are going to be all about the atmosphere and really enjoying my game. If I'm not the first to 70 so be it. First thing I noticed upon arriving in Borean Tundra was how claustraphobic Valliance Keep seemed. I got a real cramped feeling right off the bat and I liked it a lot. After doing the opening quests I saw a dwarf about killing some spiders. The quest text really pulled me into it. I always tell folks that flattery will get you everywhere and the questgivers were really pouring it on when talking to me about how they were glad that Wrynn was pulling out the big guns and "people like me". It put me in a frame of mind that I was important in the game world and things that came before me.

I would love to see them start to incorporate past deeds into this. The achievement system seems ripe to exploit this. Just grab a raid or PVP achievement out of there and insert it into the quest text. Something like "Ahh Askander! So good to see somebody qualified up there. I heard a great story in the pub the other day about you and your crew slaying Ragnaros! There was a foul creature if I ever heard of it! Anyway, enough jawin, we got problems here that are right up your alley. We've been getting battered by Vrykruul and need to push back a bit to give us some breathing room!" See? So easy to write quest text.

Late...not fashionably either

2008-11-13T08:09:00.002-05:00

So I'd been wanting to get one more player to review Fable 2 for me. Didn't quite work out as I'd expected but I have a small chunk to talk about so here we go.

My two subjects in this case were fairly opposite. One was a 12 year old up and coming gamer, we'll call him Gamer A. Gamer B was...a lady so we won't discuss her age. Besides, I don't know it anyway so "Nyah!". This is not to say she's old but she's a mother of 3 so for the sake of argument I'll simply say she's a mother of 3, married to a gamer but I would qualify her as a casual gamer. Both players are what I'd consider new to gaming whether by limit of age or exposure.

What I found interesting was the difference between them so much as their individual experiences. Both found the graphics interesting but that's pretty much where the similarities ended. Gamer A quickly picked up on the controls and soon plowed through quests, was more interested in gear and moving on to the next quest. Gamer B struggled with the controls early on, skipped a few early quest dialogs but after learning that what the NPC's were talking about was pertinent, she slowed down and listened to the whole dialog. Gamer B took time to look around as she walked through town, took note of subtle touches here and there and as a result missed a few quest items laying around at first. Gamer A found the quest objects right away but seemed uninterested in the environment that surrounded him.

Most interestingly was the final conclusion. Gamer A liked the game and has played more since I sat with them while Gamer B said that the game was somewhat frustrating but not bad. Given their impressions I would have assumed the opposite was true. All in all it was interesting and I found that watching them was quite a learning experience. I carried a bit of both with me as I've continued to play Fable.

Appeal to the almighty

2008-10-29T10:23:00.002-05:00

Dear maker of all that I can see: Can I get a month in between October and November? Well call it Ocvember. Or Novtober. See the thing is I have a lot of gaming to do right now and not enough time to game in. Kids in school, stupid body deciding that now was a good time to get bronchitis an a sinus infection, work actually expecting me to work (crazy, I know).

I had my finger on the "purchase" button for Fallout 3 this morning. I was actually typing in the numbers on my card when I stopped and said to myself "Are you crazy? You don't have time for Waffles. Or fallout!" I got so much stuff still to do in Fable, achievements in Warcraft, and kids to get dressed for school!" Sigh, life was so much easier when I didn't have kids or an interest in dating because I didn't have the money for it.

It's so easy for non-gamers to say "yeah, but you know it's going to be there in 3 months or more when you do have more time". However any hardcore gamer will tell ya, "sure, but that's not the point. The flush of a new game, it's new game smell, feel. It's just not the same when you get it out of the bargain bin." Not to mention a game like Fallout. Me and Fallout go WAY back. See Fallout used to be called Wasteland. (back in the 80's when arcades were still the coolest place on earth next to Disneyworld)

Wasteland was the bomb. Came with this book and every so often while playing the game you'd get a message akin to "read paragraph 64". So you'd pull out this book, flip to the page labeled as such and read a bit of dialog. Cumbersome? Sure, but that game was hardcore before there was such a thing in computer gaming. I still remember trying to get the Red Rider BB gun, the password to give the guy in the bar (Urabutlin) and shooting things with my LAW rocket launcher. Just cause! I remember rerolling characters for hours just to get the RNG (random number generator) to roll everything 12 and up. Wasteland was just 10 lbs of fun in a 5 lb bag and as good as Fallout is, it will never compare.

...Although I will give Dogmeat full props. Dogmeat is pure win.

The Lolcat says: Ongoing issues are ongoing

2008-10-28T08:36:00.003-05:00

So I promised you man on the street interviews about Fable. I've got 2 out of 3 done. As usual a certain friend of mine moves at his own pace and unfortunately Warcraft decided to get interesting the last week or so and I've been unable to pry him away for an hour to play some Fable. I'm still working on it. Notes are taken on the prior two testers and I'm waiting patiently.

On the Warcraft front, I honestly have to take a moment to say "Bravo Blizz!" The zombie invasion was, in my mind, a huge success. It was fun, engaging and truly made the world feel more alive for a while. I hope this is a solid indication of what's to come in Wrath.

I'm dancing around the idea of buying Fallout right now. I'm still tinkering with Fable, Warcraft is ever present and my own RL situation is taxing me to my limit. I'll probably hold off until I can give it the attention it deserves.

Fable 2, from my perspecitve

2008-10-23T07:23:00.003-05:00

So Fable 2 got purchased last night. I'm assembling the players to take part in my experiment. Hoping to start posting my observations in the next few days. Here's how I'm breaking it down: 4 people. 1 veteran gamer, 1 casual gamer, 1 almost non-gamer, and 1 young gamer. Should be interesting to see how each deals with the game and how each one's world turns out.

I tried the game out myself last night. I have to be honest here, I hated the first Fable. I had a horrible time with the camera. However, I tried it on the PC so maybe that was the issue. So I plopped the disk in and loaded it up. There was a good bit that was familiar to this old gamer but none of it felt wearying. I played a girl cause if I'm gonna play dress up with a (virtual) doll then I'm going to go for something visually appealing. And to answer the question, yes, I'm enough of an old lech that I ran her through the first dungeon in just her knickers. What can I say, it amused me. As to my actual impression, the game is solid. Not just solid but really really good. So much fun on such a small disk should be almost criminal. I had fooled around in the gypsy camp before leaving and had accidentally gotten some gypsy to fall in love with me. He came up to me out in the wilderness after I'd gone through the first dungeon and suggested a "Roll in the hay."
...Urge to kill rising here. Great thing about this game is that I really could kill the guy. I didn't, not sure why but I didn't.

Oh and the dog is wicked cool. He's my treasure finding bundle of fun! That rubber ball is the best!

See? All these asides are proof that you can have just tons of fun in the game. It's what you make of it. If you just push ahead with the main quest then that's good but you miss so much off the beaten path. So basically to sum this up: If you have a 360, you're robbing yourself not getting this game. Good warning though: I could see this one eating up a ton of your spare time.

Taking Peter at his word.

2008-10-20T12:57:00.002-05:00

So I didn't think I was going to buy Fable 2 but I liked the idea that Mr. Molyneux put forth. I'm going to let a non-gaming friend have a spin around his world and see if anything post worthy comes out of it.

On the wow front, 3.0.2 has been kind to me. I'm not usually an achievement whore. Nor am I blind to the fact that this was pasted in as a response to WAR's Tome of Knowlege. And having played WAR beta I will say the ToK is far superior. But WoW is my game of choice and the acievements thing is an interesting way to see what 4 year old characters have and haven't done. And honestly a nice way of reminding me "Oh yeah. I always wanted to do that" and on top of it I get some nice fluff rewards.

Influence and lack thereof...

2008-09-17T07:40:00.002-05:00

I'm kind of in mourning today. I have a friend who's been playing WoW for a while but he's one of those mythical "takes forever to level in WoW" kind of friends. Lots of alts, highest is 39. Lately he agreed to let me use my druid to kind of help one of his mid 20's along. Now we'd started running dungeons over and over and I think he's now almost through the 30's. This guy loves wow, loves the stories, loves to get into some of lower level stuff and I've been trying to tell him there's some even better stories and environments when you get into the higher level stuff (Strat/Scholo come to mind) and some even better stuff at 70 (Kara is a great set piece). So we were churning along when he had to let his sub drop for a while but I knew it was just a matter of time and I was looking forward to helping him do stuff like the Ony key chain because it was a great!

So I was kind of sad to see today that they're taking it out. And, honestly, I'm not sure why. Ony is old school. I get why they're breaking it at this point because the king is coming back to Stormwind. Which I wouldn't be so upset about if I knew Blizzard would adjust the quest to still be as epic and cool but I know that they'll just shoehorn in that last bit because it's just old content that nobody cares about anymore. To me it's kind of like going back to an old painting like the Mona Lisa and giving her a curly moustache. Yeah, I know, not many folks are going to care about this because it's old content and who gives a shit about Ony anymore but if you're going to recode it, do it right! So this is my plea to Blizzard. One that they'll probably never hear about and even if they do, probably won't care about but please, please, please fix this right and not just a 5 min fix and forget.

As much as I try to find something new, I just find too much comfort in old and broken in...

2008-09-17T07:31:00.003-05:00

So I tried Warhammer. Was impressed that, outside of some starting area crowding and lag because of it, the game ran really smoothly. After playing through 10 levels or so, I came to the realization that it was a decent game but there was one problem. I really don't like PVP in my MMO and, if you took that out of the game, I was essentially playing WoW. Now this isn't a criticism as such but honestly, if you are going to avoid PVP in Warhammer you might as well play WoW.

My curiosity started to get going when I realized that I was more curious to see what direction WoW took, long term, if Warhammer became the defacto landing spot for a majority of the MMO PvP'ers. I've long advocated that MMO's aren't as easy to blend as a Reese's Cup. Getting the chocolate of PvE and the peanut butter of PvP to mesh well is, to me, not worth the time and expense. One could argue that WoW is getting better at the blending with dungeon tokens tradeable for some equivalent arena gear but, really, I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many folks took advantage of that. Maybe I'd be surprised but I kind of doubt it.

Then again, maybe I'm letting my animosity for PvP taint my view of this. All I know is I'm a huge fan of the battlefield games, TF2, Unreal. I just don't like to see them in my MMO. Time and place for everything you know?

September would be a busy month for me if I wasn't so dang poor

2008-08-20T12:49:00.002-05:00

So September is upon us. Spore is upon us. Rock Band 2 (maybe) is upon us. Warhammer is upon us. I have to say, I'm not sure why but I am SO uninterested in warhammer that even I'm not sure why. Nothing I've seen of it, read of it, watched of it, inspires me in the least. I'm not saying I think the game is bad, per se but, honestly it doesn't do anything for me. Really I don't like much of anything I see lately in the MMO market. I'm only still playing WoW because of the few friends I have left that play. If I was better off financially I'd probably try Warhammer but disposable income is not as prevalent as it used to be.

Even Spore which looks moderately interesting doesn't seem to hold a heck of a lot of interest, and rock band is more of a "if I can get some folks together it's fun" kind of game. I guess I shall just continue to drift.

This crow doesn't taste anything like chicken...

2008-06-18T11:06:00.002-05:00

So Heartless has a link to here today. A few weeks ago he'd mentioned wanting to buy a new game and we'd gotten into a small (non-angry) exchange when I suggested Mass Effect. He was nervous about buying a game with SecuROM. From the above link, he was obviously right to be nervous. What I don't get is that the guy can't call in and get them to release the key at least. I mean you can do it with windows.

Not saying this is ideal mind you. And I'll happily point out that it's a really sad day when it's easier (from a general play standpoint) on the pirates than the paying customers. That's a real crap sandwich for sure and a nail in the coffin for me. I'd honestly been thinking about buying it come payday but given that situation, I think I'll pass. Which from an industry standpoint is kind of interesting. 2 cases of lost sales. Sure $100 doesn't seem like much but then again, I doubt we're the only ones out there that feel this way...

To every season: Spin, spin, spin...

2008-06-17T08:45:00.003-05:00

Interesting article here about the new game enhancements that basically destroyed the player base of Star Wars Galaxies from the perspective of the guy who drove the changes. It's basically a post assessment. I think he's kidding himself on many things but it's interesting to see things from the inside. If they were bleeding 10k subscribers a month, I'd do something drastic too I'd wager. Probably not quite on the level they were thinking though.

I'm always struck by the different voices shouting in the MMO universe. I'm a large believer that devs should communicate more with their subscribers. I mean we're paying your salary and all. Doesn't mean that every suggestion by a player goes directly into your patch notes. Hell most forum dwellers wouldn't know what balance was if it sat on their face and wiggled, however, at least the occasional "we hear you" should be floated out there now and again. I'm specifically reminded of a certain EQ developer asking "Why would you want to get significant XP for questing?" and a WoW developer arguing that there was no issue with trash mobs leading to C'thun.

Sometimes I think these guys really don't see us as a customer so much as an adversary and that's truly a shame. Most reasonable complaints come from a place of love. The player loves what you're doing and really wants to make it a better place. These guys are 10x better than any piece of advertising you can put out there. I will testify to the day I die that WoW didn't get 10k + subscribers because they advertised better than the competition. It's folks like me who played it, called up their friends and said "Holy crap man, you gotta come over and see this!" These people generally want to have a positive game experience and when they see something that just isn't working they want to see it fixed because they really believe this game is something special.

Much like class balance maybe this is just something that's a pipe dream. I don't personally think so though. I think it's possible to show the player base that you're listening without having to post in every thread.

What makes a good quest?

2008-06-02T15:03:00.002-05:00

So by the lack of my posting lately my project has obviously fallen by the wayside. Which makes me somewhat sad. I would like to pick it up from time to time but for now I have now way to put the time into it. I am no longer playing WoW and, currently, it seems like I'm unlikely to go back anytime soon. I did manage to get Conan and have been playing it here and there. So little though I just left the newbie zone last night. I liked the newbie zone experience but honestly when I came to the end I found myself anxious to leave. The end quest to the newbie zone I found potentially good but frustrating at the same time. I was glad when I was done. I have to take a break here and say I found the newbie experience in LotRo to be more satisfying but I have a weakness for all things Shire and Turbine really hit the high notes with that particular zone IMO.

Anyway to the point. Shortly after leaving the zone and tooling around I headed out of the first "non-Tortage" city and headed down into a place called Conall Valley. I ran across an old warrior who had been taken off the front lines fighting bad guys and put in charge of killing wolves in the highlands (garbage cleanup if you will). He felt he was going to die in the wilderness with no one around to carry his weapons back to his family so they could honor his memory. I found myself kind of struck by how much his speech and the proceeding responses from his family kind of hit me. I found myself genuinely drawn into the game and, upon completing it had a small sense of "doing right" in the world. I hadn't felt this cool vibe about a quest since the early WoW days when I did the Alliance pally resurection spell quest for my dwarf paladin.

So it got me thinking, why this particular quest? I'd done a few here and there there wasn't any special event. Maybe it's just me, maybe I let the quest get to me but I think it was more a case of really good writing and in a day and age where most folks (and I've been guilty of this a time or two) just skip on by the text it's nice to slow down and actually catch a few gems here and there. I always know I'm playing the right game when I have those special "that was cool" moments.

You got your enigma in my conundrum...

2008-05-06T13:19:00.002-05:00

Like so many other people I couldn't resist the chance to get into the Conan beta. Also like so many people I've had issues. Not as bad as some with the crashing and what not. At first all I had to contend with is no video. I quickly did some searching and found that it had to be run in windowed mode. No biggie and we were off. Until it became apparent about .5 seconds into the tutorial that rarely would my frame rate rise above single digits. However, being the trooper I am I carried on. My expectations were low given that most of the reviews I'd read hadn't been super glowing (save for the paid adverts at the major gaming sites, but those guys usually suck up to the big players).

So I got through level 10 and have to say that I see a great game hiding in that mess of bugs and ever prevalent stuttering. At first I thought it was hardware, I know I'm not running the bleeding edge card (mine's an 8800 GTX) but it's still no slouch. From what I've read elsewhere on the web the open beta client is old and not even as current as the closed beta which even that is supposedly not the current client.

So here are my thoughts on the whole thing: Visually the game kicks butt. Gameplay wise it's almost impossible to tell as I have to wait every couple steps for the game to catch up. I've seen some glimmers of something very cool here and would like to get a better chance to look at it. I'm risking $100 here on this game if I buy it (both for me and the wife) so I'm hoping that my soon to be placed trust is not going to be ill used.

I will say this, I've played in more betas than I can shake a stick at and I've never seen such confusion with clients. If all these issues can be directed to an old client because they didn't have the time to modify the current (apparently more functional) client then maybe this open beta thing was a bad idea. It's a simple case of do it right or don't do it at all in my opinion.

If everyone rejects a great idea, can it still be great?

2008-04-23T11:27:00.004-05:00

I'm going to be talking about this article so it's probably better to read it before you go any further.

I find the debate truly amazing. How many years and how many people have we heard trumpet "Gameplay over graphics". I know I've heard it as a mantra from developers since the early days of the Internet. I'd have probably heard it before then but I didn't know any of them personally back then, however I'd wager that it's as true as it ever was.

Now don't get me wrong, I think graphics are a BIG part of a game. It's a visual thing. However, let's be honest for a second, this isn't a movie. Warcraft, when it was released, was derided up one side and down the other for being "cartoony". Yet here we are. So I get it that developers want to push the envelope but I think it's extremely short sighted to think of the Wii as a gimmick. I would like to think that William Gibson would view the Wii is a step into the future. It adds more tactile input. Sure playing tennis on the Wii isn't the same as playing real tennis. But it's a helluva lot closer than pushing two joysticks around and mashing a couple buttons.

Think about it for a second in the context of everyone's favorite MMO. WoW is fun to play sure, but how much more fun would it be if you were actually in the world? You were really swinging that sword, when the dragon breathed fire upon you, your front would get warm, or you'd feel the cold chill of the stream around your feet as you waded through the hoards of murlocs? Sure the Wii can't do all that but I see it as a very solid step in that direction. The industry has been working on tons of tactile inputs, visual goggles, for a long time. The Wii, to me, is a very solid step in that direction.

I, for one, hope Nintendo takes the Wii, learns from what they've done right here and continues to push the envelope. Sure I'd like more horsepower under the hood of my next game but I'd like to see them continue to think outside the box even more. Maybe start giving some of these close minded bastards an idea that gaming can grow outside of the lines of "more graphics, more graphics!" and get them to start seeing the Wii for all of the possibilities it presents.

Questing eternally gets really long when they make you do it again in the sequel...

2008-04-21T12:12:00.005-05:00

I've visited Norrath of the (past) future 3 times now. I tried it shortly after release, recently when a friend said "it's actually pretty good!" and then again for this review. The early days were just that, the game was still pretty rough around the edges and the EQ2 of today looks dramatically different than what was put forth as a game back then. Graphically not much has changed but there's a lot new under the hood. I had to say that I didn't get it a fair shake when I tried it the second time. I was too distracted with WoW at that point and was figuring "yeah yeah yeah, lots changed, whatever" in response to my friend's pleading to give it another chance.

However, I have to be a parrot for a second here. The game's actually pretty good. Crafting is darn fun and a step up from push a button, get a treat. It's no Star Wars Galaxies but its got its own quaint charm. Solo play is viable at least to level 20 (as far as I got) and group play is...well it's group play. I tend to play well with others so, to me, it was pretty fun. The combo system is pretty cool and I think there's untapped potential there. So here's the breakdown:

Graphics: EQ2 has some good graphics for an MMO of it's time. They still hold up pretty good. It shoots for more of a "realistic" look and mostly succeeds. I had the graphics pumped up pretty good and noticed a couple things here or there that, in the non-mmo, market might be considered rough but could be overlooked given the game's age.

Sound: The sound was as good as could be expected. Which is to say very sharp. Lots (and I do mean LOTS) of spoken dialog. Only thing I didn't like is the combat music got repetitive quite quickly.

Gameplay: The interface is pretty clean, skills are automatically learned and can be upgraded through a series of loot/quests etc. It was neat. Sure I had fireball rank 3 but I could "augment" it a bit further buy purchasing books on the auction house or getting them through playing the game. It was a neat dynamic that is apparently going to be explored in WoW's next expansion. (although implementation of that sounds like it's going to be a bit different) One of the downsides I would like to emphasize here is the excessive loading screens. This is one of the carryovers from EQ days of yore that I was all to happy to leave behind. It's annoying and any games going forward would do well to minimize load screens as much as possible as it really takes you out of the gameplay.

Community: I found the community at large to be very helpful. Both in game and out folks were courteous and helpful. I joined a guild and they were extremely tolerant of all my questions. An all around positive experience.

Endgame: EQ2 follows the traditional structure, as far as I can see, of raiding as an endgame. However, I didn't make it far enough to see if there was more to it other than a series of dungeons.

Overall Experience: Once I got over the initial hump and got familiar with the game I got to the point where I was actually starting to be impressed with the game and have to say that I probably will return at some point in the future to revisit this game. I enjoyed my time there and can see where other's positive comments stem from. I think had the current game been the one that was released 4 years ago that EQ2 would probably have been MUCH more successful. None the less, I would recommend it to anyone looking for something new to try.

Up Next: I'm looking into Lord of the Rings and City of Heroes. We'll have to see. I'll keep everyone up to date as things develop.

Even the best laid plans can't compensate for patch 2.4...

2008-04-21T12:06:00.004-05:00

So I got distracted. 2.4 was indeed a really good patch. Didn't help that my guild was also forging into new content at the time so I got to see a lot of really neat fights I'd never seen before. But some of the shine is wearing off and, as usual, my ADD is kicking in. I will say that 2.4 was an excellent release and give them 2 thumbs way up.

In other news I'll be heading back to my world tour of gaming soon. I have my EQ2 notes and hope to post something later today. I'm also thinking about writing a bit on my WoW feelings of late so we'll see how that works out.

Overheard on the internet...

2008-03-25T14:45:00.001-05:00

"Wii-tarded".

For some reason, that just made me laugh.

Same song, second verse...

2008-03-25T13:54:00.008-05:00

They say intelligence is not making the same mistake twice, I think we all know I'm a dumbass so we'll skip by that for now. I'm sure anyone familiar with WoW knows what day it is. I'm weak so my sub has been reopened. Not gonna waste time raiding this time around. I'm more curious to see the dailies. I even have a little contest for myself so I'll log in tonight, see if I have the endurance to try and pull it off and we'll see if I'm up for this. More to come...

Oh and this in no way is going to interfere with my MMO World tour so worry not, I'm half way through my EQ2 trek and intend to complete it.

[edit] Ya know, if I keep posting like this, people are going to start expecting things...like proper sentence structure...

You can go home again, but don't be surprised if they rented out your room...

2008-03-24T12:51:00.004-05:00

This is another write up in my MMO world tour. Hope you enjoy it. If you see any discrepancies or have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

So the time has come to do a write up of my 2 week tour of EQ. EQ was my first MMO. I started playing shortly after Kunark was released. I leveled a cleric to 50. Tried to quit and gave my account away only to come back a short time later and level another cleric to 57 and get my epic (1.0). I finally left shortly after Gates of Discord was announced because there was this new upstart MMO called WoW coming out and I'd gotten one of those elusive beta invites. I say all this so you know that I came into this review with a pretty hefty amount of nostalgia for the game. However, I also had a bit of realism on my side. I knew exactly why I'd left EQ behind (corpse retrevial, LONG leveling curve, forced grouping to name a few). I was fairly certain I'd be facing an uphill battle, though, as I was now well below the level cap. I found I wasn't far from wrong. For about the first week, I found myself with severely limited (or no) options for getting a group from night to night. I joined a casual guild to try and find an "in" for grouping but even then there just wasn't much in the way of leveling options. Particularly for my 57. Finally, when I'd all but given up on EQ and was figuring the entirety of my review was mainly going to consist of cricket chirping, an old friend came on and the two of us got a group invitation.

Suddenly I got a real dose of what it was I used to like about EQ. It's was the fellowship. Sure EQ has lots of things that have been modernized (death penalties, chat interfaces, travel, to name a few) but I'll be honest, EQ moves at a much more sedate pace. I walked away from my PUG feeling like I'd spent a few hours on the porch in the rocking chair talking to some nice folk from up the lane. Ok, I've never done that but I've got to imagine that's what it would feel like. We set up shop in one place and didn't move for close on 3 hours. Surprisingly I didn't feel like it was grinding because the whole time we were chatting, being friendly and generally having a good time. It was a really positive experience and really reminded me why I did stick with EQ for so long. The mechanics really encourage the human connection and I really wish WoW did it more but honestly, that's like apples and oranges when you get down to it.

So all that being said, here's the breakdown:

Graphics - Eq ain't no spring chicken anymore. That being said they have revamped a few zones here and there and they certainly look nicer than the older stuff. Taking age into account the game doesn't look horrible, but, for a game over 10 years old, it's definitely not the top of the heap. If you're looking for something to challenge you're new Ultra l33t 9million GTS gaming card, this isn't your stop.

Sound - Sounded good, but combat music gets repetitive quickly. I found mysef falling back into the old, what's on the Mp3 "playlist" habit very quickly.

Gameplay - Eq is what is is. If you're looking to log in for 15 minutes and knock out a quest, odds are this isn't the game for you. Some mechanics have gotten better (corpse retrevial), while some have pretty much stayed the same (forced grouping, limited solo content). I tried out spirit shrouds as a means to solo a bit. I was definatly able to solo the low level stuff, I didn't see that it fed me much XP on my main. Looked to take about 200 kills per level of shroud XP.

Community - I talked to several folks both in my guild and in the game in general. Almost everyone was positive and helpful. EQ's community has definitely gotten smaller but the folks that are left are the ones that really love the game and are interested in seeing new folks come on board.

Endgame - EQ is all about raiding at the endgame. Thing is, at least from my perspective, that it takes so long to level in EQ that, for someone like me, who may not level so fast, the leveling is the endgame because it's unlikely I'll ever hit the cap.

Overall experience - EQ is what it is. I caught a glimpse of what I loved about it,
and I definitely saw the things that annoyed the crap out of me when i was playing it full time. If you got patience for slower progression and enjoy your MMO with a side of socialization then EQ is probably for you. Assuming you can get to 70. It can be done but it'll take some patience.

Next up: What better way to follow up the grandaddy of MMO's than with it's offspring. I'll be back in a week and a half with my review of EQ2.

Sure my arm may have gangrene, but who doesn't want to be the hawt green alien chick from Star Trek?

2008-03-13T14:36:00.003-05:00

So a friend of mine wrote me about a piece of my recent PotCo article and it kinda got me thinking. Here's the core of what he said:

"...something struck me. The forums. TR doesnt have a real forum either. I think thats a hell of a mistake. I think the wow forums, for all their faults, really add to the sense of community. I think they become integral to people getting closer to the game. Having game announcements and the ability to whine is important. The devs dont have to read them and probably shouldnt. However, having CM's that can comment and hold things together make it feel as though theres a connection to the game.

The ability for folks to share information amongst one another is important too. I know in TR everything feels spread over the net and half those sites feel like failures. It makes the game feel like a failure. I know when I roll around and see forums that are basically 2 people in them and sites that dont really have a lot of traffic coming to them it makes me feel like the games over. Its a bad face to put forward. You may never see these people in game but when you click on the wow forums you can feel the sheer numbers of people. "

So I replied but then got to thinking about it more and couldn't put it out of my head. I mean who doesn't agree that the WoW forums suck balls as far as any real information goes? It's obviously a community for better or worse. But does it really help the game? Is it a hindrance? Or is it a metagame for a portion of the player base?

I would argue that the last option is certainly true for some. And maybe the answer is all three plus some I haven't even listed. WoW's community certainly conforms to some established theories.

I've always considered the WoW forums just to be what they are. A place to go and hang out, kind of a bar if you would. Your friends are there, folks who have been frequenting the place since it opened it's doors, of course there are the drunken jerkoffs, and pretty much everything in between. But despite this, or possibly because of it, the place has taken on a life of it's own. Sure it exists, but does it serve a positive purpose? I'd posit that the realm forums are, at least usually, a bit saner, but even then, is it useful as a whole?

I can't seem to make up my mind about it. On one hand, I see what my friend is talking about, but then I remember my EQ days before the official forums existed and we did just fine. There was a board run independent of Sony and it had a great community. It still adhered to the personality archetypes I listed above but it was policed by the players and the truly obnoxious never stayed around for long. Of course there was much more player accountability back then. Being blacklisted on a server actually impacted a player's chances of getting things done. That doesn't really seem to be the case with WoW. Ninja'ing is just a way of life and spending time with other players in game is not really a requirement. I guess this doesn't really help settle the question before me. I guess it's just EQ's 10 year old apples and WoW's 3 year old oranges. It's a brave new world, where's my time machine?

[edit] ...and ZOMG 3 days in a row with the new post...what's the matter with me?

Random thought of the day...

2008-03-12T12:30:00.004-05:00

Am I the only person who absolutely can't stand the word "Sheeple"? It's like the hipster word of the minute that people think sounds cool but just really shows what a smug bastard you are.

I know it's not game related, but I'm just saying...

Man on the Internet ('cause they don't have streets on the internet) - Pirates of the Caribbean Online

2008-03-11T12:12:00.004-05:00

So I decided to start with Pirates of the Caribbean online. Why? I dunno, I just like pirates and it's free to try. So after trying it, then complications in another online game (that shall remain unmentioned) I decided to try a series of 2 week reviews of MMO's on the market both young and old and see what was out there if one was interested in trying a MMO other than WoW.

I'll measure each game by the same criteria:

Graphics
Sound
Gameplay
Community
Endgame
Overall experience

That being said, let's look at how my time in Pirates turned out:

I didn't keep as much focus on how much time I spent on this game as I intend to in the future. Overall I'd say I spent around 40 or so hours in game. By this time I felt I had a good grasp of the main mechanics of the game but I will stress that only allowing myself to 2 weeks of gameplay limits what I'm able to experience.

Graphics - The game is built (from what I understand) on top of the Toontown engine. So it's a bit dated. The settings look piratey enough, but in a day and age where I can go from Crysis to 10 years ago in graphics, I found myself wishing for a bit more depth. I understand scaling back so that the game will be more widely available to those who may not keep to the cutting edge of technology but at the same time, this wasn't a browser based game and I kept wishing for less jagged edges, some shadows, at least a better rendered sky. There were polish issues here and there as well like fires burning in mid-air, NPC's stuck in the ground, etc.

Sound - If you like the PotC soundtrack this game is good. If you don't like the soundtrack, I'd imagine you'll be muting your speakers within about 5 min. of loading the game. Again, there were several areas that lacked polish in the sound department as well. At several points there where sound effects occurring that I could couldn't really see any reason for them to be coming out of my speakers. On top of that, sometimes a sound bite would get stuck in a loop. I had one point where I boarded my ship just to make the sound of drawing my saber stop from playing over and over again.

Gameplay - The game in leveling respect reminds me, somewhat, of Ultima Online. Where you spend your time is where you skill up in. If you spend time moving the boat around, you get skill in sailing. If you run folks through with your cutlass you get better in that. Each skill set has levels which award points that can be applied to that skill. So if you sail a lot you can increase how fast you move, or turn or how much damage the main broadside cannons do. I found sailing to be quite fun as far as time spent goes. Land combat reminded me of Diablo click-fest syndrome, however there was a combination system built in that I thought was quite clever. The impetus to practice is so that you can be skilled enough that when you boarded another ship you would be ready to defeat captain and crew. I never was successful enough to capture another ship so I'm unsure what happens if you win there. My assumption was that I would be able to capture the ship and sell it for a boatload of doubloons. I'd like to take a moment to mention here that the game had a /lfg system in it but as far as I could tell all it did was put a "Looking for crew" tag over my head. I couldn't for the life of me find any menu or interface that allowed me to search through all the folks that were looking for a group and see if I couldn't put a crew together. When I went looking for a manual on the main site and the wikipedia, I came up dry there as well. Given those facts, my assumption is that this is a "someday" feature.

Community - No official forums. I did find one here but it was fan driven (nothing wrong with that mind you). The folks there did seem nice and willing to help out. So nothing driven by the folks that develop the game but where I did find a community, it seemed fairly tight knit.

Endgame - At this point from what I glean from the forums there's a main quest to help Jack get back the Black Pearl but that once that's done (basically once you reach the upper levels) there's not much to do at this point other than raise your individual skill levels. So endgame from others descriptions sounds kind of thin.

Overall experience - There were things that I liked and things that greatly annoyed me. When sailing I would go from scarcely anything to fight to 10,000 mobs in a 10x10 foot square. It seemed like they were hardly ever spread out or I would get ambushed by 2 other ships while fighting one that was apparently alone. Once in a while is OK for that, you know. I didn't look where I was sailing but it happened a little too often for my taste. Kind of a feast or famine situation. Sure there were bugs and polish issues but at the heart of it all is, I think, a game with a lot of potential. When it worked I had a lot of fun. The few times I actually did get a group together, I had fun shooting ships with the cannons. It actually reminded me of a pirate simulator I played years ago at Disneyworld. Hopefully the Pirates guys keep working on this one and one day it might be a downright fun game to play.

Next up: Everquest

If God were to die, do you think he'd go to Earth or Greyhawk?

2008-03-05T10:43:00.004-05:00

I really don't get much into the cult of personality. I hate reality TV and this whole glamorization of movie stars really grates on me a lot of times. I personally think I'd have been a better person on the whole if I'd never heard of the likes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan or any number of other people with no discernible real life skills.

However, every once and again, someone dies and it really hits home that we as human beings have really lost something special. I got that way when Henson died. Yeah I know, who really cares all that much about muppets, but I grew up on them and even documentaries about the guy used to intrigue me greatly. I remember my first thoughts on hearing that he died were that of "wonder what imaginative movie or character we're never going to get to see." I know it's so in fashion to be an atheist now a days but honestly, I hope you're all wrong just so I get the chance one day to talk to him about projects he never got to do.

That being said I felt a real loss yesterday upon hearing that the grandfather of GM's died. Being both a dedicated computer gamer as well as a Pen and Paper fanatic, his early works influenced practically every facet of my leisurely time (not to mention some of my non leisurely time as well). I've never met the man directly but I've met a couple of folks that were in his sphere of influence in the early days when Chainmail was something that was considered new and innovative. They spoke nothing but praise of him and I always hoped that someday I'd get to shake his hand and thank him for providing the opportunity to have those weekends around somebody's table, dice in hand, excitedly drawing another group of 4 to 5 into a story that had inflamed my imagination.

I'll never get to meet you Gary, but I'd like to think you'd be excited to hear about what I'm going to do to my group in next week's campaign. We start at 7, drop in and have a look...

Aimless meandering just gets you lost...

2008-03-04T14:25:00.006-05:00

Warcraft and I have a love/hate relationship that dates back to about 6 months after release. I'd like to say we've worked things out but I'd be lying and nobody wants that. So Warcraft and I are living in seperate houses at the moment. I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to get up the energy to mend things, and I certainly don't see it changing it's habits anytime soon. I'm tired of the way it wildly swings the "class balance" stick around. I've come to downright loathe it's inbred cousin, PvP. Don't get me wrong, I'd like PvP when I'm away from Warcraft at Team Fortress' house or sometimes even Call of Duty's apartment. Had PvP been in the picture since day one with a measured hand at the wheel things might have turned out, but basically she showed up after Warcraft and I hooked up and she's just become an ever more irritating and distracting part of our lives.

I could go on with my laundry list, but honestly, who likes hearing people bitch about their ex's? Point is, odds are I'm done with WoW for quite some time to come and I'm feeling the need to turn over a new leaf. Starting this week (starting already actually), I'm going on an MMO world tour. Ok, that sounds more glamorous than it really is. Here's the gist: I'm going to spend 2 weeks playing a new (to me) MMO or revisit one I've left in the past and then, I'm going to blog about it. After which, I'll move on to another MMO. Tentatively my plans are to visit the following MMO's: Pirates of the Caribbean, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest 1 & 2, City of Heroes, and Lord of the Rings. I hope to run this up to, and include, the release of Conan. We'll see how that goes.

In an attempt to try and keep this professional, I'll go over my general impressions, rate the game based on visuals, sound, general gameplay, customer help (I'll try to find something to put in a ticket about and see how fast/well the in game help responds), and overall quality. Then close everything out with some general commentary. This is kind of an experiment for me so we'll see how it goes and adjust things from there.

The idea behind all of this is to revisit games of yore to see how they've changed since I've been there, visit new games I've never played to see what they have to offer, and in general get out and meet the inhabitants of all these different worlds to get my MMO commentator/critic juices flowing again. I also think it's important to note here that I am not going to be comparing these games to WoW. Mostly because these games are different and in some cases (like everquest) it's not really a fair comparison.

Last of all, I have 6 titles currently in mind but nothing's set in stone at this point. I may change my mind or if, perhaps, you have suggestions or would like to see a particular game reviewed, please feel free to email me or leave a comment. I'll see what I can do.

First up: Pirates of the Caribbean online...Yarr!!!

Here's a forest, but what I really want you to look at are the trees...

2008-01-16T15:17:00.000-05:00

Here's a post by Drysc on the official wow forums earlier today (My comments after the lengthy post):

The need for some amount of randomness was gone over at BlizzCon in the Raid & Dungeons panel, I would recommend looking up some of those shakey-cams on youtube if you've never seen them. Some good insight on design of the encounters.

I would agree that the light-heartedness of the Opera is a really refreshing change, and it was great there's a place for it in Karazhan. In a world of demon-infested castles, dungeons, and dark caves it's not every one you can create such an event and have it fit and make sense. So, I think the Opera event was more a product of location than of the desire to make something a bit more whimsical.

As for Prince Malchezaar and that fight, yeah it's got the whole random thing going on with the infernals. However; you can mitigate the randomness of their drops any number of ways. By being over-geared you can certainly deal with the problems better as they crop up, but then really why are you fighting Prince? You can also track the fall of the infernals, have a barker that's good at watching them and able to anticipate their placement. Or, use one of a couple different placement strategies that make it almost impossible for an infernal to interfere. The last one being the most popular these days I suspect.

Encounters need randomness, as small as miraculously dodging that one hit, all the way up to a fight randomly dropping green meteors on your face. There has to be some amount of randomness, or there's no human element, no need for you and your group to adapt and react, which doesn't make for a fun and engaging fight.

Each encounter is going to use different mechanics, and not everyone is going to like every mechanic or basis for a fight. Personally I would rather fight Prince than Netherspite just because of my personal experiences. So which of us is right? Which encounter is better or worse? Or should there maybe be a variety so that a dungeon can appeal to a broad spectrum of people, groups, and playstyles?

So here's where I get off the ride and stop drinking the Kool-aid. He doesn't get why people don't like Prince and do like Opera. To a certain degree players like random. Every week I went to Kara "What do you think we'll get at Opera?" was the first question asked. Well after "Who's MT this week?" anyway. Thing is the object of raiding is to not die before the boss does. If the encounter is a skill based encounter and you wipe, it's easy to go back and say "Bill, you suck as a healer, or Jim you need to work on your threat generation, etc". If the encounter is like Prince and you get a bad elemental drop you can't do anything except eat the repair bill and get back up that long staircase as fast as you can.

Now a lot of folks now a days are going to say "Just stand here cause the meteors can't land here" or "just eat the damage" or some variation thereof. The problem is this, if you have the gear to eat the damage you probably don't need most of the loot off of prince anymore and, from seeing the fight well over two dozen times, odds are the safe spot isn't really intended to be a safe spot. The fight is supposed to teach a raid how to move as a cohesive unit. Which in and of itself I wouldn't mind if the fight didn't have a tendency to create a cock block that would put raids into a fight that they can't possibly win (what one might call a luck based fight).

I certainly hope some of the developers have a better understanding of this than Drysc or we'll be seeing more of this in future content.

Things to do when you're standing on top of a mountain...

2007-12-14T13:48:00.000-05:00

So I've found myself talking about, and thinking, about the WoW endgame of late. At 60 you pretty much had the 5 mans (BRD, Scholo, Strat, DM, and upper and lower Blackrock Spire) and raiding. Sure you could PVP but rewards from BG rep was fairly weak and forget about getting to Grand Marshall/Warlord unless you were an independently wealthy insomniac or were willing to cheat and have several folks take shifts.

Here at 70 wow players have so many more options. You can now PvP for decent purple season 1 arena gear, do the real arena thing for vastly better season 3 gear, raid (Kara's fairly easy to get into now a days), do your 5 mans on regular or heroic, daily quests. There's so much more content for 70's than there were for 60's. It's honest growth from blizzard showing that all the bitching I and others like me did before TBC came out was heard by the devs. I still have issues with WoW, such as the sunwell raid which, to me seems like a foolish waste of dev. time but I'm much more willing to let it slide than I was when Naxx came out.

So what would I like to see at 80 is where this all leads me. Some fun ideas:

- Solo quests for gear upgrades. (5-8 step quests that result in a piece of gear that's an upgrade to 80's blues) These quests should take at least 5 hours per piece of gear to complete. They should be close to (but not better than) badge or beginning level raid gear. They should also have a set bonus.

- Games of chance. At least a 30% payout rate so that you don't feel like they're totally throwing they're money away. Don't put mundane stuff like poker in. Think things like wolpertinger racing or something like that. Maybe a series of minigames or giant chess games like in Kara where the pieces fight each other.

- Tradeskill questing! The daily cooking quests are good for a start but so much more potential lies there.

- Guild housing. Don't just make a building. Make it so that the guild has to collect resources to decorate it. Then put some real functionality inside it. Arena queues, Trophy cases showing off guild raid boss downings stuff (like Gruul's head, or a horn from a dragon kill). Guild bank access (naturally), maybe even quest givers that give out guild based quests that give them all special rewards that are only available via completing those quests (more detailed tabards for instance)

These are just a few ideas. I think it would be fun to see more things to tie guilds together as a community or even factional quests for alliance and horde to give more of a sense of attachment to either side.

The sound of a pregnant pause was deafening...

2007-12-12T14:17:00.000-05:00

So it's Christmas (oops, forgot to say holidays! Too bad world, I celebrate it and am happy to do so) anyway the smell of new releases has dissipated (don't they make a spray for that?) and the long 2 week wait for my lewt has set in. I'm hoping for my plush weighted companion cube and Crysis to take up holiday residence in my stocking. Aside from that all's quiet on the gaming front. Still playing Guitar Hero 3 and Hellgate London (which I'm finding quite the tender spot for) with the wife.

Wow's very non-news worthy of late. 2.3.2 is taking way to long to push to live and is holding up all the news worthy 2.4 discussion. Most wow noise lately has been about "welfare epics" of which I don't really get. If you're getting arena points on a regular basis, who spends them on Season 1 gear? I know if I gave a rats ass about arenas and actually tried to participate that the 3rd place gear set would be last on my shopping list so why not throw a bone to revitalize the battlegrounds? It's pretty useless otherwise. It's like complaining that blizzard is giving away tier 1 sets in Strat/Scholo/LBRS (which I think would be kind of cool to do). Who cares about teir 1 when I can go farm T4 in kara for little more than a few hours work?

And that pretty much sums up my feelings on that...

Screw you Thanksgiving break, I'm still workin' here...

2007-11-26T09:30:00.000-05:00

So my three favorite blogs seem to have temporarily gone dark. Even the non gaming blog I regularly read has gotten in on the action.

So I've decided that in the interim it's time to stop slacking and take up the torch from vacationing bloggers.

So, without further ado, on with the show!

Last night we went to Gruuls Lair. Now before you start thinking "he said he didn't do What-I-did-in-wow-last-night-posts, this is more on a 2.3 patch section. We had to deal with hunter's accidentally dispelling fire shields with their new shot and fear mechanics making the stupid warlock ogre run all over the friggin cave. At one point I was tanking Olm and I swear it felt like he ran me all the way back to Astranaar. I got so tired of his death coil. In the end we got him down and I almost got my t4 piece. Better luck next time though.

On the non-wow related front, I've been busy with lots of holiday games. Hellgate ~~Diablo~~ London is decent if you like Diablo clones. I found it funny that they originally had a kid right at the beginning called Wurt (a deliberate throw down to Wirt from diablo series) who, when I logged in this weekend, had gotten his name changed. Apparently they felt that everyone already got that this was a Diablo like game and didn't need the overt overtures.

I've also had Orange box as I believe I've mentioned previously. Finally got through the original game (awesome) and started on episode 1. There's this part in ep1 where you walk around with no light outside of a flashlight that works on rechargeable batteries. So I'd cleared up to this doorway, then ducked in and back out to activate the zombies. Blew them all up and then turned out my flashlight to let it recharge. Well turns out I didn't kill them all because when I turned the flashlight back on there was one right in front of me who immediately attacked. Scared the living crap outta me. I thought I was going to die of a heart attack right then and there.

Over on channel 4 we have Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I'd heard of this game but never got a chance to play until my oldest son got a PS2 for his birthday. I thought this was an incredibly smart game and was more fun than any gamer had a right to until another friend brought over his 360 and a copy of Rock Band this Saturday. I'm officially obsessed with learning to play the drums now. I have no idea where or how I'm going to get a real set, but I must have them. Rock band is similar yet very different than GH. Both are good in their own right but I'll be honest, Rock band is way better IMO because you get everything that's good about GH but you also get karaoke and a very realistic drum set. When you get it right playing the guitar it's cool and you really get into the game but when you get it right and in the groove playing the drums it feels like the real thing and, to me, that's ten thousand times cooler.

Also, it's Christmas time. If anyone's rolling around in piles of money and not knowing what to do with it, I'd happily love to play Crisis for you.

Morning funny

2007-11-14T08:41:00.000-05:00

VG Cats with a little humor I found oh so funny both because I have 4 young boys and also because I'm a lover of all things Portal.

Back later with a real post (I hope).

If he says he's a doctor, it must be true 'cause nobody lies on the internet...

2007-11-05T12:07:00.000-05:00

I think one will probably get a good idea for EA's current attitude for it's potential customers and it's umbrella of development houses as the release for Warhammer online unfolds.

Interesting. I made this post back in October. Then on Friday Mark Jacobs made the following statement in his "state of the game address" for Warhammer:

One of the “popular” topics of discussion regarding EA Mythic this past week has been the subject of layoffs within the studio. While we did let several people go from the Warhammer Online team, the number was *quite* small and their loss had no impact on our development schedule. These layoffs were part of our normal studio operations and a necessary step for EA Mythic to ensure that we have a focused and committed team working on WAR going forward.

Fascinating. So let's break this down, shall we? We'll skip the first part because we all know it's been talked about.

While we did let several people go from the Warhammer Online team, the number was *quite* small and their loss had no impact on our development schedule.

Of course not. Otherwise the investors of your parent company might get worried. It's always about putting on the brave face.

These layoffs were part of our normal studio operations

I don't think it's normal to fire anyone. Firing one person is a disciplinary action. Firing more than one person usually means that your dad came down and said there were too many people at the party and some of them had to go home. I mean you're working on a project almost guaranteed to make money and you have a looming release date (now pushed back) and you're telling your customers that you accidentally had too many people working in the office? Yeah right.

a necessary step for EA Mythic to ensure that we have a focused and committed team working on WAR going forward.

All this adds up to corporate speak to me. He's putting a positive spin on probably an interesting factor in the delayed release of the game. Although I read on the interwebs somewhere that the client was practically unplayable.

I personally have no stake in Warhammer. I could care less about it. However that's due more to Games Workshop (who I hate) than Mythic (who I kind of like).

So the guys you fired were not really focused on the project? What they just come into the office and blog all day? (Not that I would EVER do that)

Early Christmas presents are like finding out your hot cousin isn't really your cousin...

2007-10-31T11:59:00.000-05:00

I know...eww. But yeah, I went there!

So I tried out the Crysis demo this weekend. How this one slipped under my radar is unknown to me. This game is not for the faint of PC but if you've got a fairly decent rig you're seriously missing out not trying this FPS.

Name changes got announced in WoW this week. I find that this will probably only enhance the community of dickwads that pervades Warcraft. I like Warcraft a lot. But honestly, the community sometimes makes me pine for the times when I used to play Civ. Alone. Not having to deal with other people.

So anyway, Halloween is tonight and so no gaming for me. Fortunately I got out of Ravenholm this morning and will be quite happy if I never go back there again. I honestly wish I'd had enough time to forge a Weighted Compainion Cube costume. Everyone's doing the TF2 costumes but those were the gimmies. Very few people could pull off a companion cube and I think that, given the proper amount of time, I would have been just the man for the job. Oh well, I'm sure I can come up with some other "hot at the moment" pop culture reference for next year.

By throwing in the kitchen sink, we can create a new and more powerful blog post...

2007-10-26T09:20:00.000-05:00

So I tried out the Hellgate London demo last night. It's very interesting. Reminds me of the format of TR, with a dash of Diablo. Likes: Controls, environment gameplay. It was easy to get around, quick to learn and it felt fairly apocolyptic. Dislikes, though, mainly have to do with the camera. It has some sort of fishbowl aspect to it. I couldn't get comfortable with it in first person perspective and my avatar in 3rd person looked abnormal. The movement just didn't look right. So I guess I'm saying, if little things bug you, this game might annoy. If you're a gameplay > graphics person then this might keep you entertained. I probably won't be getting it myself. Not because I don't like it, just money's tight right now and between Orange Box and WoW I'm fairly busy.

Speaking of which, Team Fortress 2 continues to engage. I've gotten pretty proficient with the engineer and the medic. I really like the support feeling to the engineer and the "right behind the big guy" feeling to the medic. I'm still struggling with the spy more than any other class. My son however is running rings around people with him.

I know I'm not usually prone to talk about my night to night experiences in Wow but lately it's been really positive and I'm all about the sharing so I guess I'll let this one go. Being back with my old raiding guild again in WoW has been good. We had a really great run at Kara this week and general feeling is that we could be a solid force to contend with in ZA shortly after 2.3 is deployed if we continue on the way we have been. I believe there is going to be a push for 25 mans soon. I'm especially looking forward to seeing another raid instance besides Karazhan.

Between all of this and the imminent arrival of a Wii at my house, just in time for the holidays (It's for my kids, I swear), my gaming schedule is looking pretty darn good!

Just because I'm late to the party doesn't mean I don't get cake...

2007-10-15T11:34:00.000-05:00

So all the buzz closing out the week last week was about EA buying Pandemic and (more importantly to most) Bioware. I knew as soon as I saw the news that I wanted to post on it, however I wanted to really digest the news before commenting. It was fun to read all the "The worldz r ending!" posts. However a strong counter contingent of "Who cares, EA isn't horrible and won't affect bioware's at all".

As usual I, personally, think the truth lies somewhere in between. Exactly where in between remains to be seen, however. It seems unlikely that EA will be some overbearing parent to these development companies. At the same time, new bosses have new ideas on how things are to be run.

I think one will probably get a good idea for EA's current attitude for it's potential customers and it's umbrella of development houses as the release for Warhammer online unfolds. I think that the events surrounding the release of that game will give everyone a good idea of just how much of a heave hand EA will have going forward.

Or maybe Mythic is just that good and we won't pay attention to the man behind the curtain...

The long and short of buffing abilities

2007-10-03T12:19:00.001-05:00

So I'm looking over my Tabula Rasa character last night and I come across a skill called Bio-augmentation. The skill on the surface buffs different abilities by 50%. Sounds awesome? It actually is. Here's the rub, though: lasts 2 minutes, costs a good chunk of ~~mana~~ power. So basically to utilize this awesome buff I have to stop the party every 2 minutes run through my entire power pool and likely still not have everyone buffed. Now granted a person who mostly uses their ~~magic~~ power wouldn't use the body ability very much...except that they would because it ups hitpoints. And every class has abilities (read spells only in Sci-fi). So in the end everyone has need of all 5 buffs this skill gives out. Which brings me right back to the crux of the problem.

So I'm sitting there looking at this skill when it dawns on me. OMG, I picked paladin...AGAIN! Then proceeded to utter a rather long string of obscenities. So now we'll segue to this weeks subtle note to MMO developers: Players FUCKING hate short term buffs. Especially if they're going to take an assload of ~~mana~~ power to buff the whole party. So I've decided, as I'm sure many other players going down the same path as me, are choosing to pretend there's just a black space where that power is and go on with their lives. I would think that the lesson would have been learned from EQ ~~DaoC~~ WoW. Guess each new MMO is like reinventing the wheel. I mean it's not like they look at each others games and ~~steal~~ learn from them.

Dont' get me wrong. I like Tabula Rasa. I think it's got a lot of potential. In the end, however, I find TR to be like Seed. (Yes, I was one of the 12 people that played that game). It's missing TONS of content, still has a metric ton of things that are either half finished or are "in the works" which absolutely need to be there for release. Mechanics are still in place in game for things that were taken out patches ago. It's just messy. I'm honestly thinking I'm going to wait and buy it 6 months from now when they maybe have it shored up a bit in the bug and polish departments.

You need DRM like Eskimo's need air conditioning

2007-09-24T10:48:00.000-05:00

This article over on Ars Technica was a great read so I felt like sharing it. On the surface, one might ask "What's this got to do with gaming?" However if you went out and bought Bioshock on day one only to be greeted with this picture (Thank you SecureROM), then you know what I'm talking about.

Look I sympathize with these companies. I hope to someday be a published author (instead of a the lazy fat ass I currently am). I understand that the people who put blood sweat and tears into the creative process would like to eat. However I also agree that I shouldn't be punished (in the form of abusive, invasive, overbearing DRM) for buying your product.

Modern day fact is that the person most harmed by DRM now a days is the consumer who legitimately purchased the product. I can not think of a single digital product that I cannot (with easily attainable tools) circumvent. DVD? DVD Decrypter! Software? Game Copy World. Music? I don't have enough space in this blog to list that out. And this is off the top of my head. Give me Google and 5 seconds and I could probably give you a who's who of pirating without even breaking a sweat.

So in the end, and the very point of the article above, what's the added value of paying these DRM companies now a days? Seems to me like not much more than a tarnished reputation for hating their legitimate customers and root kit scandles.

Today's letter is "C" as in Contrast and Compare...

2007-09-20T14:37:00.000-05:00

So I mentioned last time that I was playing in the Tabula Rasa beta. It's new game smell is still filling my nostrils with it's sweet ambrosia and I've started looking around to see if I can fill in some blanks on questions I've had about the game like "can I do skill respecs? (no)", or "Is it intended that the zombies keep getting up over and over again after I shoot them in the head with my really bitchin' laser shotgun?" (Yes)

So this quest invariably leads me to the beta forums where I get a distinct impression off the bat that folks are upset that you can solo the entire game. (instances apparently included) They're looking for incentives to group, not necessarily raid, mind you, but they're looking for an in game reason to get together. Now I already have a reason, it's called friends and lots of bullets. We group because it's fun just to run in guns a blazin. But I can see the argument.

In the mean time I'm perusing Wowinsider and notice this poll they have running. Currently, by a fair margin the leader is "I want more solo content". Now this poll is neither scientific nor does it represent the entire WoW playerbase. However it's representative of some of them. It's also not the first time I've heard or seen such ideas held as desires of the player base of WoW.

It's an interesting contrast. A game that's completely (according to the beta players) soloable where they want more forced interaction vs. a game where interaction is forced and the players want more options in solo play.

I think it proves a couple points I've made in the past:

1) It's impossible to please every subscriber in any given MMO, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try (within reason)
2) There's no such thing as too many choices.
3) You should declare what kind of audience you're targeting and make sure that you stick with that core audience because it's easier to retain users than it is to draw them in, once a game has launced.

I got polymorphed into a busy bee last week and it apparently doesn't wear off...

2007-09-17T10:36:00.001-05:00

So, Here's the list of software currently on my quicklaunch bar:

*Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
World in Conflict
World of Warcraft
Lord of the Rings Online
*City of Heroes
*Bioshock demo
*Tabula Rasa

Everything with an asterisk has been installed in the last week or two. My wallet is starting to verbally countdown to, what I assume, is a complete meltdown. Up until a couple weeks ago WoW and LotRo were my staple games. However of late I've been hardly playing them. I put WoW on notice last Friday. I have 5 or so more days until it goes dark and, honestly, I'm not really sweating it. LotRo is my Monday night gaming group game. I'm calling in sick tonight and I might be putting it on notice this week as well.

City of Heroes is one of those games I feel like I have to go back to every now and again, but I never stay overly long. I'll probably cancel it by months end.

I finished the Bioshock demo and I feel it's a quality game. I can see why it's getting so much hype but I think I'll pass on it for now.

I've been eyeing World in Conflict and Enemy Territory for our next lan party and both seem decent. WIC is an incredibly fun game I can't wait to play in a larger environment. ET:QW however, I'm kind of split on. I like it, fairly solid game play. Basically it's (what I've played so far) like the Assault map type from UT, with progressive objectives. My only gripe is the people die too fast. It's hard to get into the flow of things when I'm dead in two hits from pretty much any weapon. I'm not saying I want to be an immortal god, just be able to take a few more bullets before I drop dead.

Finally Tabula Rasa. This game wasn't really even on my radar 2 weeks ago. I knew about it, read a snippet here and there. Friend of mine had gotten in the beta and got me a CD key. I thought what the heck, I'll try it out. I managed to not only find a game that I rather like but I've already brought 3 more friends into the fold. This is what I game for. Shared experience. We're all abuzz about this thing we just did or that new weapon...it's definatly that new game smell.

I'll have to post again in 30 days at the release to still see if I have such high praise for it. But for now, I'm officially on WoW hiatus.

He sees forrest, he sees trees, I see a big spider waiting to eat me...

2007-08-30T08:38:00.000-05:00

I've touched on this so many times, but I've never managed to put it as succinctly as Foton does.

http://afkgamer.com/archives/2007/08/30/the-karazhan-mistake/#more-1538

I wonder if blizz even understands that the reason Kara is so popular is that most guilds are having to reform, disband and relocate, etc just to get it done only to get farmed out by a guild lucky enough to have moved beyond it making the former start all over again. Kara most likely isn't popular because people love it so much, it's most likely popular because it's the only option available to most guilds.

Rome didn't fall in a day, but it sure burned fast when the time came...

2007-08-20T15:03:00.000-05:00

Was just reading an article over at wowinsider that got me thinking. Wow was bigger by far than most folks in the industry ever expected. I remember it's release. Both players and industry folks knew it was gonna be big but I can't remember one person that expected it to be the behemoth it actually turned out to be. Everything about it has defied expectations and general rules of thumb. Many folks cite it sizable player base as a reason that WoW isn't going anywhere in the next 10-20 years.

Here's where my "what if" comes in. I won't argue that WoW has a large player base. I will argue that many folks who are playing are disenfranchised. Myself included. Ask anyone who knew me. I was sitting on the very last atoms of my seat waiting for TBC to launch. I actually had my credit card out to buy a beta account off of eBay because Blizzard obviously didn't know what kind of injustice they were visiting upon me by not giving me an invite. That was then, this is now. I honestly can say I'm rather lukewarm upon the whole "Lich King" expansion. What I truly want in an x-pac is a topic for another article.

The point being is I think there's several folks in WoW (or any reasonably seasoned MMO) who are playing for the friend aspect. It's a linchpin that could see a fallout in player subscriptions at an alarming rate. I can say I know no less than 25 people in real life playing WoW right now. I know one that's actually satisfied with the game currently. Oh sure we all have their different reasons (Raid game doesn't feel the same as the old MC/BWL days, too many changes in the form of nerfs, Blizzard doesn't seem to know what to do with my class <- from a paladin, x-pac was nothing new/more of the same, etc). I've seen all of these excuses parroted in blogs all over the Internet.

I think the point of the problem can be summed up in the old adage "You can't please everyone". Problem is Blizz is trying, and trying hard. Now I know I've harped on this before so I'll not rehash it again. I don't need to drone on about the dangers of PvE nerfs for the sake of PvP balance or trying to please raiders and casuals at the same time. If you haven't read me talk on it here, I'm sure you've heard it else where. And, to give credit where credit's due, Blizz has done better at some of that than other companies that I won't mention.

However, when you compile this with the fact that (in my opinion) Blizzard has one of the least cohesive communities I've ever seen. I've played on 4 different blizzard servers in my WoW career. Every single one has shared the same issue. Very few people are really tied down to their guild. Players move all the time, they less dedicated to the individual players of said guild and more keen on the idea of "What have you done for me lately".

Anyway, the point of this post is this. WoW has a lot of users vs. say EQ2. Let's assume the same % of users exist in both games that are looking for something better than what they're currently playing. Let's be optimistic and say 30% of the users are looking to switch. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Assuming a population of 9 million vs. 500,000 obviously if a game came out that would appeal to the disenfranchised of both games, obviously WoW would take the bigger hit. Granted even on that theory WoW would certainly outlast EQ2 because they have more population to lose. However, when you factor in perception, and the laws of motion things might not work out the way one would expect. ie. EQ2 losing 100,000 people might not be as noticeable as WoW losing 1.8 million. People who might otherwise be sitting on a fence suddenly see a large movement of players to "Hawt new over hyped MMO 2k9" suddenly they want to be with the hip new thing. Assuming the game is done right, WoW not only loses moment but their large player base suddenly works against them and the tide of people leaving causes a snowball affect.

I'll cover my ass in all this by saying it's purely the meanderings of somebody who's bored at work and maybe I'm just blowing smoke. This all came from someone pronouncing loudly in a blog article that WoW will be here for years and years to come. My theory is just as possible as his. I'll be curious to see who's right.

Crazy things overheard in Vent:

2007-08-07T12:14:00.000-05:00

70 Hunter: So, I didn't actually train misdirect. Didn't think it would be important. If we really need it, I can hearth back to shattrath and train it, but I'll need a summon back.

You know what, go ahead and hearth back but, honestly, I don't think we'll be needing your services for this particular, or any in fact, raid.

The bird in the hand principle only works if you if you take the long view...

2007-06-26T07:34:00.000-05:00

I am officially tired of hearing people say the phrase "WoW = Waiting on Warhammer". I've yet to hear it attached to anything other than a post or blog entry grousing about how much WoW sucks. Don't get me wrong, I've got my share of complaints and a poll of 1,000 people willl come up with at least 900 different answers of what went wrong with Burning Crusade. However, I've never seen a segment of a market that is so willing to torture themselves. A player will make post after post on the forums talking about how much Blizzard sucks, WoW sucks, his class sucks, the forums suck (I agree with this one), yet they never seem to actually quit. I'd love to see the numbers of people who make "I quit" posts in relation to those that actually do quit.

Anyway, in an attempt to stop my derailing train of thought I'll get back to the point. Warhammer, maybe the next big thing. I have read the hyped press releases. There are definatly a few points there that have my curiosity piqued. However I've seen many many MMO's come and go and they almost universally down to a game all have one thing in common. The amount of promises and hype delivered before a game is released is greater than what's actually delivered. It's just the law of the land in MMOTown. And so I continue to sit and watch all these people who act like Warhammer is the second coming of the MMO Messiah and wonder if they're all new to the market or if they're really that blind to the way things work in a MMO.

Now before folks think I'm bashing Warhammer let me clear things up. One, I'm pretty certain that Warhammer will release stable. Dark Age of Camelot set the stage for what a solid release of an MMO looked like. To my recollection, they were the first ones who put out a MMO that was more than just this side of barely playable. I assume that will be a reasonable assumption.

Two, I assume most of the features promised will be implemented at time of release. I'd be surprised to see everything implemented. However, I'll qualify that by saying most of what I've seen so far is pretty vague. That's a good way to keep people from coming into the game going "WHERE'S MY HERO CLASSES?!?" thusly starting off on a bad foot with your consumers.

However I think folks at this point are basing their early opinions of warhammer in the vacuum of pre-release. As always, what happens if nobody decides to play the bad guys on one server and good guys on another server. That would certainly make for certain kinds of frustrations for the players and difficutly for the Devs in balancing content. And, as we've seen so many times before, frustrated players can (and usually do) turn into players who are just waiting for the next big thing.

Now, for the most part, this is just part of the regular churn to MMO's. There's always going to be dissatisfied customers. I'd be willing to bet that most of the folks who are sitting around on the forums bitching about how Blizzard "needs to get their collective heads out of their collective asses" are probably going to be sitting on the Mythic boards this time next year talking about how Mythic doesn't listen to their players and they need to get on to implementing X feature or balancing Y class and if they don't...well that player is just going to leave for Star Trek Online! Which will quickly spiral back into the same talk that we hear now on the WoW forums. Problem is they'll never be happy and it'll always be greener in the the next over hyped game's beta that's just around the corner.

Here's an idea A_Grouchy_Gamer_231, stop playing MMO's. They all operate, behind the scenes, in pretty much the same manner. You're not happy here and odds are you're ultimately not going to be happy there either. I hear Nevewinter Nights 2 and Oblivion are super cool. You should check those out.

It's not the changes you can see, it's the ones you can't see that get ya...

2007-06-20T11:49:00.000-05:00

So I'd been mulling over a post for the last few days. I thought I had down what I wanted to say then Blizzard cut the rug out from under me by removing the attunements from Serpentshrine an The Eye. I can hear the screams of "So what?" through my monitor. Everyone agrees it's a pretty big change. Difference with me is I think it's just an opening salvo.

General consensus is that the expansion really screwed up a lot of guilds. I myself have lamented the bottleneck that was (and still is) Karazhan. Now I'll clearly state that the change yesterday in no way fixes this problem, but then the damage has already been done. Folks are sifting through kara, the stronger (or more determined) guilds are surviving. New ones are forming out of the ashes. Eventually most folks that want to raid are going to end run or survive through Kara and move onto the bigger fish.

But the change. Tigole's post was that it was too complicated to attune. I'd argue that the attunement process wasn't really any harder than any of the others to date. I think this is a lure to see if they can up their total player to raider quotient. I think, at best, that they'll get a small spike and little else. I think ultimately that the bean counters are noticing a distint lack of interest in raiding. I would hypothesize that, conversely, the daily quests are getting a LOT more mileage. Wow players, at least the impression I'm getting, are becoming quite fond of "Burst play" (I'll lay my claim on that term right here)

Burst play is "I got 15 minutes before we have to leave for something I don't want to do, but I gotta get a quick wow fix, I'll go wrangle up some nether rays real quick." The daily quests solve so many issues, quick questing that sees immediate results. Short time requirements and decent rewards.

I think in the end you're going to see more brainstorming on how to satisfy the "I don't have 4-6 hours a day to play" gamer. They came to WoW on that promise. They want to stay with Wow, but I'd wager if another game came out that offered that kind of play style with a solid, stable, relatively bug free game you'd see blizzard numbers tank fast. This isn't a "WoW Killer" lament or wish, that was the one I was hoping to post before this whole thing hit the fan. I'll probably try to revisit it soon.

Back on topic, I think WoW is a quality game that suffers from multiple desire syndrome. From what I've seen of development they're trying to satisfy too many people at once and it's making balancing a virtual nightmare. PVP is turning into league play similar to Guildwars and Starcraft ladder leagues. PvE is Casual vs. Raider. I think WoW's biggest challenge to staying a viable game long term is deciding what it wants to be. I don't think you can cater to every play style and hope to keep any of them. The PvE'ers are getting really tired of not knowing how they're going to be radically changed from one patch to the next, and the PvPers live in constant neurosis of the PvEers surpassing them in gear marginalizing the time spent PvPing. They aren't interested in PvE content and want to skip straight to the PvP part.

The sooner blizzard narrows their focus the better off both players and designers will be.

Quick and Dirty, and of little consequence...

2007-06-06T12:47:00.000-05:00

So I think I'm bored playing WoW I just haven't found a reason to quit. I'm leveling my druid, playing around on my mage but I'm not really "doing" anything in WoW of late. My wife and friend seem to have hit the same downward emotional spiral. However my WoW guild is due to start really hitting the 25 mans in the next couple of weeks, so I'm hoping my raiding doldrums are about to come to an end.

I find the most glaringly obvious times that I'm bored in WoW are my Tuesday night Lotro game session. Tuesdays are when 2 of my friends and I log in to play Lotro. We don't play the characters any night other and Tuesday and, for the most part, that's the only time we play. I always come away from Tuesday nights thinking about what a great time I had, and that I've played enough to last me for another week. There's a good bit I'm looking forward to but it mostly centers around the idea of playing with my friends next week and less around "Man, I need to get sword X or get Y ability up 20 points." It's odd, very seldom have I been less advancement driven in a MMO. Kinda nice to have such low demands on the game. Means that I'm less likely to hit burnout, but probably also means it'll be tons easier to give up too (unlike WoW).

I'm honestly pondering getting a Wii. That, of course, is assuming I can find one but I hear it's gotten easier of late. I'm just afraid to buy a $300 console and find that I'm not as interested as I thought I was (I'm a founder of the eyes being bigger than the stomach fan club). So I may yet deny the device entry into my household.

Saw Pirates of the Caribbean on Monday. It was OK. My complaints, as usual, were not what most other's complaints were. Overall I didn't feel I wasted my money but the movie could have been better and the sappy ending was...well sappy! I'm looking forward to Harry Potter next (Not nearly as much as the book however) and hoping to be pleasantly surprised by Transformers.

The clue plane just took off, sorry you missed it...

2007-05-24T08:18:00.000-05:00

So here we are. New patch in Wow. It's a brave new world. Kinda reminds me of the brave old world. Black Temple hit the streets. Too bad most of the streets weren't ready for it. It's all part of what I like to call "The ongoing saga of developers who don't really pay attention to their paying customers needs".

Look I understand that Black Temple was supposed to ship with TBC and you guys didn't get it done in time. It's the whole need to see something finished syndrome. I often suffer from it myself. Problem is we get tunnel vision. So while you guys burned the midnight oil getting BT out the door you've actually missed Rome burning to the ground. I'm watching guilds fall apart on my server left and right (and judging by the forums we're not really unique). The Kara choke point is causing no end of stress to your average raiding guild. True some have worked past it but it's almost universally agreed that the instance is a total cock block. Here's an idea, why not make a 25 man that drops slightly different loot than Kara but a few bosses that drop Teir 4 tokens so that you have the option to do either 10 man or 25 man content before heading off to Serpentshrine or The Eye. Chances are you'd get a metric ton more mileage out of that than you would Black Temple.

Course I'm not the first person to say it, just another voice in the (usually) ignored crowd of people who are stuck in this quagmire.

My big ball of string is actually lots of little strings...

2007-05-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

Random stuff from the closet:

Starcraft 2 announced. I played the first. Was a lot of fun. I was curious to see what they'd do with a SC MMO. I'm not so sure it's out of the equation yet. They preceeded WoW with Warcraft 3 so there's a chance.

Heroes ends tonight. I'm both excited and sad. The story has been great but after tonight it's going to be a while till we return to that universe.

Watched Vanguard implode last week. Was very popcorn worthy. What it wasn't, was unexpected. I tried the beta and read all the hubub. Thing was doomed long before it launched. I feel bad for the folks out of a job but it happens. Good luck to them on the next project. Hopefully it will have less "vision" and more actual project planning.

Played my druid a ton this weekend. Got rewarded for it. He's got 5 more levels to 70. I can't get there fast enough.

My Tuesday night LoTRO group is getting back together this week after a month hiatus which is good times. Can't wait to start leveling my champion again. Then again, I'm thinking about subbing in my burglar. Somethings never change. My MMO ADD is definatly one of them.

I don't think I've mentioned it previously but if you are a fan of Mystery Science Theater then this link is for you. I personally recommend Eragon. Watched it last night and laughed till my sides hurt.

I'm hoping to squeeze in a trip to the theatre to see Pirates 3 this weekend. Anxious to see if this is a good sequel or a bad sequel.

It's my glass house, but I'm going to throw rocks anyway...

2007-05-09T14:20:00.000-05:00

Ok, I want to complain but in doing so I'm going to make myself look stupid as well. So here it is. I'm stupid. I wasn't paying attention and should have figured it out sooner.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm sure everyone's curious to know what the hell I'm talking about. So *ahem* let me set the stage:

No shit there I was, out in the netherstorm. I was trying to wrack up some cash to continue my arduous quest to finishing my spellfire set. I went over to this island to do a quest called Building a Perimeter. I went to a rune, clicked the item watched it light up but got no credit for it in my quest log. So I went online to see if I was doing something wrong, or if something was up with the quest. Everything came up negative so I figured it was time to whip out the GM ticket and call the powers of the overlords down upon this mortal coil to see what they could make of the situation. I briefly pondered going off to do something else, but the more belligerent side of me decided to sit right there and wait so that I could show the GM exactly what was wrong when he showed up to resolve my issue.

30 minutes later, I was on a new episode of "My name is Earl" when I finally got the "I'm GM Inahurry, do you have time to talk about your problem?" I responded with "You bet, I'm at the item right now, watch this crazyness!" clicking the item and showing the non responsiveness on the part of my quest log.

Two baited breaths later I finally received the dreaded "This is a known issue and should be fixed in a future patch. Is there anything else I can help you with?" Sighing heavily I replied "No, this was more than enough "help" for one evening." and the GM vanished like the insubstantial being they are.

So I leave the island, Pursuing easy money elsewhere. I land near some burning legion baddies and take aim at their leader. My fireball lands and he begins to charge me but to know avail. My powers are too great and my foe lies vanquished at my feet. Quick right click for the drop that, for some reason isn't there. Another quest unable to be completed. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

At this point I'm sure some of my more astute readers have caught on to what was happening (or more likely those who have experienced it before) It was about this time that a little tag above my name that said "group 2" caught my eye. See, I had logged hastily out of the game after a raid the night before that had gone on overlong. Logging in the next day, I didn't stop to think about still being attached to a raid group.

So there I sat, fuming over my own stupidity as the light over my head slowly blinked on and started to get brighter. Suddenly I sat straight up exclaiming aloud "That stupid son of a bitch!"

See the reason I couldn't find anything on the various wow quest helper sites about the quest being bugged is that it wasn't bugged at all. Hence when the GM came to (not) help me, he took the easiest way out. "Bugged but being fixed" without actually trying to help me with my problem.

It speaks volumes about how badly your game is constructed when even your support staff assume your code is fucked up without even trying to see if it's user error. He didn't even try to evaluate the situation to see if it was something I was doing, he just spouted some rhetoric and went on his way.

So the moral of this story is two fold:

First, the golden rule of tech support: at least 75% of all problems are caused by stupid users. As a user always check the obvious stuff first. (which in this particular instance, I didn't do)

Second: Blizzard, your in game support sucks donkey balls. Please inform them that it's OK to spend more than 2 seconds talking to a customer and while you're at it teach them actual troubleshooting skills.

Stupid RL keeping me from slacking off more...

2007-05-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

So I log on last night for some scheduled instance action with my guild. We all chatter around for about 10 min or so when I ask "So we doing this instance thing or what?". The person organizing the whole shindig promptly responded "Not unless mages suddenly learned how to heal". Once again bit by the lack of healing I logged over to my paladin and turned on the auto pilot while watching Buffy ( much <3 for the Mayor of Sunnydale, he ruled).

Back in my EQ days I played a cleric. he was pretty much my only toon. I had a few other part timers so I could get a break now and then but by the time I left and moved over to WoW I was pretty much tired of playing the healer bit and wanted some more action. However, as we saw last night, my action was curtailed by a lack of folks willing to babysit the group. Leaves an interesting question on the table? No not where have all the healers gone. Being one of them, I can answer that question. I think the bigger issue is WHY did we move on.

I'm sure there are as many reasons as there are players for why there's a healer shortage. Ranging from everything from "boring" to "tired of being blamed for wipes" to "want a change of pace" to ...well you get the point. I think the bigger question for all involved is either "How do we get them back?" or "How does the game continue without them?"

Some have suggested that being allowed to spec both in a support/healer roll and have a secondary spec which is more about soloing or what not is the answer. City of Heroes answered it by giving many types the abilty to heal on some minor to moderate scale. I don't know how WoW will handle it. Or even if they consider it an issue at this point. But more and more folks are seeing a shortage in the trinity in either the healing or tanking role. Hopefully they're trying to find a way around the issue before it becomes a crisis.

I'm flawed but I'm trying to improve...

2007-04-24T14:45:00.000-05:00

I apologize for lack of updates. Well I doubt anyone's here to apologize to anymore, however assuming I ever do get readers again, I'm going to start trying to update more. Part of the change is going to be me widening my horizons about what gets posted here. I've tried to keep to a narrow view as far as what's post worthy but I think that's part of why I didn't post much here. So from here on out, I'll try to paint with broader strokes.

On that note, Heroes finally returned to tvland last night, and I was there with my popcorn. If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing some good TV. Not super original, but pretty good in it's own right. Certainly nice to see something other than reality crap that seems to be almost the norm now a days. If you get a chance the episodes aren't too hard to find. www.nbc.com has some (if not all of them) online.

Got a new guy at work who's...dedicated. I view it as both good and bad. Bad in that he's going to be way more of a worker bee than I ever would wish to be. However, he's already getting my slothful self motivated. I actually studied for a cert test today. I haven't done that in 3 years.

Go me...

My playground, my ball, GTFO...

2007-04-24T14:20:00.000-05:00

So I come home from my boring as shit, stressful as all get out, job yesterday and my wife looks at me and and asks me how my day went, while knowing from the look on my face that it was (as is the norm lately) complete and utter crap. I ramble on for a few about how I hate being a cog in the wheel that is my job then it slowly dawns on me that she's got the wrinkle in her forehead that says "I'm irritated".

So my mind immediately changes over to "less about me, more about you mode". OK, I'm a guy, so it's more like I'm going to try to be sensitive but I'll probably screw it up mode. After a few minutes of explanation, and (golf clap for me) few screw ups on my part, she lets me know that her guild is going from 2 raids in kara a week down to 1. She's sad because it means that of 20-30 active raiders they're going to only take 10 on a given week. To add to this, it's going to be a static 10. (I'll refer to them as the A-team from here on out) Now my wife is a warlock and most of the DPS caster gear is sub part to what she can craft or loot outside of Kara. Which seems strange but she honestly isn't about the loot. She'd prefer to raid with friends and blow every last gold in her bank and watch every piece of loot go to other folks. I know it sounds like a load of crap, I mean c'mon who plays MMOs like that? But I swear it's true.

Anyway, the long and short is the powers that be (PTB) have decided they're not progressing and attendance is an issue and they'd rather guarantee 1 solid raid over 2 potential ones that may or may not make it. She's frustrated because, even though she's the officer for her class, there are better warlocks, she admits, and they should and probably will get picked first. The PTB stated that after they clear through kara they'll take 1 or 2 people through a week until they're all geared and ready to move on to the next step.

So I poke around their forums today and notice that most are OK with this change in policy. So my mind starts cranking around trying to figure why folks WANT to get sloppy seconds while my wife is irate at being put on hold for a few weeks (possibly a month or more). I came up with several possibilities any of which may apply.

1) These folks are willing to let others do the hard work and ride the free lewts onto the next challenge. If I was a leader I'd worry about this one. What happens when you get to content that requires all these tag alongs to actually step up and swallow that repair bill and countless hours of banging your head and not progressing?

2) They're willing to be patient and understand that progression takes time. I'd like to think your average guild member is this benevolent. The realist in me is rolling his eyes at the moment however.

3) The guild as a whole really does want to advertise progression so that recruitment (when necessary) isn't an issue. This one is possible but I'd have a hard time swallowing the pill of "We as a guild downed Netherspite!" if I wasn't able to contribute.

Said guild has, in the past, had the numbers to field 2 kara raids. However attendance, as I said previously, was an issue. Me personally, I'd make everyone sign up and, come raid time invite everyone signed up, and on, into one raid. You take your top spots and fill the raid. Then have the next most senior person who isn't in the raid, collect the rest and see if you have enough for a 2nd raid. If so, then go try it with the expectations, and advertisement, that the 2nd team might not happen and has no expectations of achievement. If they only get through a couple bosses then fine. Some loot was had, and folks got experience with the encounter. Point is trying and failing, in my opinion, is better than not trying at all.

Personally I think NOT taking people could be more of an issue in the future than the effort needed to form a 2nd raid. It's SO easy to screw up some of the boss encounters in Kara that I can't imagine not trying to get people as educated as possible. Then again, I'm only loosely affiliated with said guild and have been rarely raiding with my own wow guild of late. So it's probably best I put the rock down and just go sit quietly in my own glass house.

My brave new world has rainbows...

2007-03-05T10:20:00.000-05:00

So I'm out of WoW with a lot of time on my hands. Which is both good and bad. I've caught up on my TV by watching all the episodes of Heroes up to present. Very cool series, made me scrap and idea I'd had similar to it about a man who "infected" normal people making them super heroes. Too close to what they're doing here to avoid a lawsuit or a "been there, done that" feeling. Oh well, a good story is always appreciated.

Got some painting done but haven't really been back in the creative "zone" as it were yet. So I'm spinning my tires in the PC realm playing supreme commander, LOTRO and Battlefront 2.

Trying not to get too deep into LOTR yet, however, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to play it on release and don't want to spoil it for myself. It's interesting in that it's just enough like WoW for me without being wow. A friend described it as an "elegant MMO" and I think that's an unusual description but, after thinking about it for a bit, kind of apt. Gone are the tongue in cheek jokes of wow, as well as the stylized art work that really defined the look of Warcraft. They're doing things a little different and yet somewhat the same as far as mechanics in a MMO are concerned. Things like interface and how abilities work are pretty intuitive and very reminiscent of Warcraft. Class roles aren't anything too far from the norm but they do have some subtle differences here and there.

I haven't gotten too far in it yet, but I hope some of the "involved in a story" that they put you in early on picks back up as you level. I liked the smaller part of a larger whole feeling I got early on. Many of the quests I've seen have some interesting stories to them. Haven't gotten to see a dungeon yet however. I doubt there are many for level 10 noobs such as I. Hoping to try out monster play soon (hopefully this week) as well.

Trying to get some things accomplished around the homestead this week but still hoping to have enough time to get non-house oriented things accomplished as well.

It's not Thanksgiving, but I'm having cold turkey...

2007-02-27T08:21:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I posted...

A really long time. what can I say? The Wow expansion came out, I got busy. Problem was I was playing furiously all by myself. I'd log in, run quests, try to get groups and then not find groups and run quests some more. It all culminated in a guild run night where I spent the entire night (4 hours) standing outside the portal to Durnholde keep. I sat at my PC for 4 hours NOT playing the game but surfing the web on my second monitor, while waiting to play the game. As the evening progressed I realized a couple things. One, how ridiculous I was standing around waiting to get in an instance with my guildmates. Two, that I had done less than 10 instances in the time I took me to get 2 characters to 70 and 67 respectively. Nobody, on my server at least, was grouping at all. Why was I paying $15 a month to basically play a graphically inferior Oblivion? So clocking in at 4 hours and 15 minutes I logged out, removed the game from my hard drive and canceled my account.

Now there are other, unimportant details to this story. My reasons for leaving can't be entirely cast upon this one evening but a building frustration getting groups to do dungeons both inside and out of both guilds I had characters in, a feeling of repetitiveness and just, I think, a general restlessness.

So I'd gotten Supreme Commander the week before and now I get some extra time to play it a bit. I'm still in Lord of the Rings Online but I'm not playing it. We'll see how I feel around release time. In the meantime I'm going to try and re-ignite my creative fires. Get some painting and writing in. I'll see if I can be more focused on it this time. Maybe even get some real blog time in.

Oh, and by the way. If you're thinking about going to see Ghost Rider, save your money.

Watching TV while waiting for the storm...

2006-12-21T10:39:00.000-05:00

With all the news around of people prepping for the expansion or pushing hard to get things done ahead of time, I find myself setting my goals aside. There's stuff I'd like to do, finish getting my warlock and hunter to 60, finish getting 300 blacksmithing on my hunter, actually getting my helm off of Onyxia for my mage. But mostly I've just set WoW on auto pilot. I've actually been pretty apathetic about all my current PC games.

I got into beta for Vanguard and LOTRO but found both to be clones of other games (LOTR = Wow and Vanguard is everything oldschool EQ ever hoped to be.) Don't get me wrong, both have some positive notes but I've basically played both games in other forms and really have a been there, done that attitude about them. With WoW in kind of a "why bother" mode, I'm left trying to entertain myself in the evenings. So I checked out the online stream of Heroes last night on NBC. Great story. I'd actually scribbled down a similar type of story (not exactly the same) about a year ago but, being the lazy writer I am, I got beaten to the punch.

So in the mean time, with Christmas upon me, hopefully my presents will include something to pass the last few weeks before the expansion which I'm quite excited for but I've been so excited about the expansions arrival for so long, I'm kind of worn out on being excited and am at the stage where I'll just be satisfied to actually be leveling my character again.

So how about you, dear readers? What're you doing to pass the time till the expansion? Or are you enjoying the current expansion of your favorite game? Any suggestions on passing the time for me? I'm open to trying something out and blogging my thoughts about it.

Extra! Extra! All the news that's fit to bitch about...

2006-12-12T15:00:00.000-05:00

This just in...Blizzard comes to the realization that power gamers blow through content at roughly 2x the speed of light.

I rarely complain about a massive multi player game. I'm not a developer so I don't have access to the behind the scenes info that they do and I realize that sometimes, even though I'm hurt by the change, that it's necessary for the good of the game. I'm not one to rush to press talking about how blizzard sucks, but this whole honor revamp (and the ensuing nerf that I just knew was coming) really stinks of lack of thought on the developers part.

For those not in the know, as of today's maintenance Nethaera made the following sticky post in the general forums:

Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it's been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we've determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today's maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation.

Now this troubles me on a couple levels. (which I will conveniently outline for you below)

1) Predetermined honor gain

Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor

This seems to indicate that Blizzard was unable to tell how much honor the average person would receive for a given amount of time in the battlegrounds. I'm going to chalk that specific point up to wordplay and simply because I know (from experience dealing with not just wow but many other MMO's) that these guys love to run numbers. It surely wouldn't have taken anyone super long to write an equation to show what the average return on honor was for a battleground run. Thusly if they knew (random numbers here folks) that an average winning AV awarded 5k honor, AB 2k honor, and WSG 1k honor, then it wouldn't take long to figure out that someone could earn anywhere from 5-10k honor an hour. (again these are my made up fake numbers here)

Given that those numbers were likely available how could they NOT figure out that power gamers (read: those w/o jobs and/or lots of spare time on their hands) would achieve their rewards rather quickly?

2) Changing honor gains after the fact

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished

Let's face it, cat's out of the bag here. Most of the die hard players I know got a large portion of what they were after out of BG's already (if not everything they were after). So in the manner that they're changing it, they're only hurting those folks who haven't gotten a chance to participate yet. The "casual players" if you will. The folks their hoping to slow down have already reaped the rewards. Only people left are the ones who don't have a ton of time to spend doing this in the first place and probably would have taken a month or so to get one item anyway.

3) Nerfing items that will be, at most, useful for about 1-2 months.

Let's be honest here, only thing people are buying (and using) right now is the level 60 pvp items. In about 30 days we're going to get hit with the juggernaut that is the expansion. And any items purchase will quickly be sent to the vendor (or shard) pile. Is it worth the grief, really, that you let folks play with a few items that were previously unattainable when in just a few short weeks we'll all be swapping them out for better gear found in the Outlands?

Lastly, because I never complain without supplying my own solution, if they're really concerned about about extreme honor gains anyway, why nerf by an arbitrary number. Why not make it more clear to the folks trying to get honor by simply capping honor income. Come out saying something to the effect of "Players will only be able to get 5000 honor per day. On top of that don't put it into effect until after the expansion is released. This gives people a quantitative number that they can use to calculate how long it will take them to get the aforementioned honor and a visible date so that they don't feel like it was a ninja nerf. All they've done is take an already upset community (so many changes) and rile them up more when they were given the impression just a day or two prior that if there was any change at all to attaining pvp items that they would become easier, not harder, to buy. Seems, rightly so, that this was a classic case of bait and switch.

I'm not dead, but I'm not in beta either...

2006-11-21T08:30:00.000-05:00

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=48645577&sid=1

Check the above post before reading this:

I love these posts. This isn't the first one I've ever seen on the boards either. It's fairly common.
Condensed version (for folks who don't want to admit they visited the cesspool that is the official forums) goes like this: Casuals will get owned in Karazan because it's hard and they don't have the patience to die over and over again.

Now I could bolster certain logical arguments already presented in the thread like "MC and Ony used to be hard too or I remember wiping on the Baron repeatedly back in the day". However I think this will be most effective if I play devil's advocate here. Let's use Naxx as an example.

Most folks who shell out hard earned money for WoW every month haven't been to Naxx. Naxx was specifically a raider's paradise. The dev's put their collective heads together and came up with (what I presume from reading about it) was a tough instance that caused you to really work for your loot. Problem is only a small percentage of people ever actually got to make use of said new instance. So here we have a company, making a product (the game) who spends time, effort and money enhancing said product, which is a good positive thing. People who pay for MMO's pay to have their game expanded and grown. Otherwise they'd be playing Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights 2. Problems arise, however, when said enhancement caters to a very small portion of the paying customers. Now from a sales side how do you pitch this to say a crowd of 100? "Hey look, 100% of you will be able to experience this much while another 2% of you get to expierence this extra stuff over here!" Those in the 98% category are going to feel like their money is going to help the small "elite" group and if the trend continues will (perhaps rightfully so) begin to complain that their money is being ill spent or worse yet, take their business elsewhere. Which is the opposite of what Blizzard wants (being that they're in the business of making money)

Which brings us to the link above. This link is all about how Kharazan is going to be difficult and folks are going to wipe repeatedly and folks who haven't raided or have not progressed beyond MC aren't going to be able to participate in Kharazan until a bunch of folks complain and it gets nerfed. So here's my counter argument: If they make it so difficult that only 2% of the playerbase will ever want to go in there, why make it at all? I genuinely belive this is why the argument for hard mode dungeons is a sound one. Everyone can experience the isntance if you go through on regular mode. You want difficulty then go hardmode and show us what a badass you are. I do believe hardmode loot should be better. You brought your A game and should be rewarded for it. However making an instance for 2% of the population is bad business sense and, based on some of the larger changes to the end game, I think Blizzard has begun to realize that as well.

I reappeared when no one was watching...

2006-09-26T13:33:00.000-05:00

So what a horrible blogger I am. Not posting and everything for weeks. Truth be told, I don't want this space to become "What I did in WoW last night." Many of you play Warcraft and you all have adventures and just because I log into a game, doesn't mean that it's exciting for you. So because of that, I might go silent from time to time while I wait for a soapbox to present itself. What this probably means is that when I DO get around to posting, that no one will actually be reading anymore to listen to me up on my soapbox. That being said, let me introduce everyone who's not reading to my new friend "Hybrid Soapbox".

Last weekend a close friend of mine, and probably the only person still occasionally checking this site, called me the champion of hybrids everywhere. What's odd is this is the first game where I've really focused on hybrid characters. In EQ I was a Cleric, DaoC a Thane, CoV a mastermind, Star Wars a crafter (cook actually), etc etc. The list goes on for ever. In WoW my level 60's are Mage, Paladin and Priest. WoW is the first game I ever played where my role was usually kind of fuzzy. I mean most raid environments force paladins to heal and Druid's to heal and mages to shoot things. So on the mage it was pretty clear what I was supposed to do. I was a fire mage so I pressed my orange buttons till my fingers fell off. (unless we were fighting fire elementals or ragnaros then I pressed my blue buttons)

Point is, as a mage most of my spells got used (heck given I was a fire mage I even used mana shield and fire shield when there was a possibility of taking collateral damage). I always found it frustrating that in a raid environment that all my paladin and druid abilities melted away to 2-3 buttons. All of them heals. Now I played an EQ cleric for almost 5 years, I don't dislike the healer and I'm more than willing to fill in the game but it seemed a real waste of a character to boil me down to a weak priest. I mean outside of blessings and Innervate why bring a hybrid. (I'm sure the same can be said about shaman totems) I often scoffed that if some other class got an innervate that druids might never be invited again. Before you say it, Battlerez can be replaced by lock's using Soulstone. Point is they take this whole dearth of abilities and basically shake everything out and say to you "If you heal then you're a healer, get out of melee range".

So after all this, what's my point? Well the point is this. Now that we've seen all the talents (save hunters, I feel for you guys, really) it seems to me, as I peer across all the changes, that hybrids got the biggest boost/change out of everyone. Well maybe affliction locks can compete, they got some pretty strong talents. Now on the eve of the beta, when it's likely that we're about to get a literal flood of information on items and numbers on how things work, I'm just conjecturing here. But if blizzard does indeed itemize for off specs (+def plate that also has intelligence, or leather that has lots of +dam/healing) I think we're going to see a fundamental shift in how raids are handled.

In the past when filling a group it's always been traditional to build on the 3 major rolls in a party. Those being Tank, healer, and DPS. This means ideally you want a warrior, priest and most likely a mage or rogue (secretly priests hope you get a mage so they don't have to use the water that cost money). You fill the other two slots with utility of some kind, pallys for blessings, druids for battle rez (both for backup healing) and then maybe a 2nd tank or (more likely) more DPS. This worked the same way in raids. You needed at least 2 tanks (some encounters required 3 or so), X number of priests and X number of DPS classes. Support (druids and pallys) filled in the gaps. 2 - 3 paladins was fine (4 wandered into the throw away buffs) and 3 or so druids (4 just meant you had more healing but at the expense of DPS). Problem is Paladins and druids never filled the DPS or tanking slots and neither did was well healing as priests. Which left them super useful (roughly) once every 6 or 15 minutes when it came time for an innervate or blessing and moderately useful when you were fighting supporting the healers. This of course is just generalization. My druid would often place higher up on the healing meters than lazy priests but sometimes fell behind quick on the draw paladins. Truth be told though, while I considered myself a pretty good resto druid, I could never seem to beat the more competant priests.

What I see, with the seeming buffing of the hybrid classes (this is just extrapolation based on what I see in the talents, time and hard numbers will either prove or disprove this) is that they seem to be bringing hybrids more into line with their counterparts. I still don't forsee paladins or druids being better healers than priests but they were always decent to have around to support the main line of healers. Difference I see now is that paladins seem to be getting stronger as tanks, shaman seem to be getting some interesting damage buffs, and all 3 hybrids seem to be getting little tricks that will help the raid overall. These tricks alone don't seem like much but when you bring all of them together what you get is a different way of doing groups. Rather than having each group balanced out with healer, tank, dps in a raid, I can see them going more to Tank group, healer group, melee dps group, caster dps group, etc. Where each gets it's bonuses from some hybrid ability and thusly the overall raid gets a healing, dps, tanking boost.

In the end, what I think it's going to come down to is this: Rather than filling the foundation of your raid automatically with Warrior/preist/Mage, what I think you're going to see is raids formed around rolls. You'll need 3-4 tanks. So you take 2 warriors, a prot paladin, and a feral bear form druid. 6 healers, let's take 3 priests, 2 paladins and a resto druid. DPS comes from Hunters, rogues, mages, locks and now maybe a few shamans sprinkled in. In this brave new world it's easy to see a shaman dropping totems at the beginning of a fight, tossing a couple lightning bolts, throwing a few heals here and there on some dps classes so the healers don't have to, a druid popping out of cat to innervate a priest, drop a moonfire then going back in to do some mangling, the paladin up there dps'ing throwing out heals on himself or dropping back to increase the healing output where needed all the while giving the MT group priest a 6% increased healing capacity. Raids where the hybrids can actually utilize some of the other great talents they have. This is what I forsee based on the talents I see being released. Maybe I'm right or maybe it's this nice utopia that will never be realized. Who knows.

Long time, no post

2006-09-05T11:46:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, I haven't been struck by anything in particular to single out lately. I've read some semi interesting speculations of late. One on healers, one on loot but overall it seems that my gaming life is pretty stagnate at the moment. I'm leveling a warrior that I hope my new PvE server guild finds useful. I've been known to speculate on how classes such as the paladin and shaman play out in the expansion. I do believe there will be some shifting to be done but at this point it's just that, speculation, and until it's actually happening there's little to be said. I do wish Blizzard would hurry up with the other 3 talent trees. Based solely on the leaked druid talents the priest ones had better be really good. However I'm curious how accurate the originally leaked druid talents are because they were, in fact, so good. I'm curious to see how this weeks news plays out.

I've begun thinking again about acquiring a 2nd MMO to play but that urge hasn't reached a crescendo yet so it's likely a ways off. I'm curious to see Spore and Supreme Commander on the market as well, but both have a bit of a wait yet so we'll see them when we see them.

Writing has taken a back seat recently but I'm formulating a plan and putting it into motion soon which should get me back on track there.

In the meantime, keep your swords sharp and the mob in front of you.

The turning of the page and other metaphors about the future...

2006-08-22T06:51:00.000-05:00

So in World of Warcraft terms 1.12 got released today. I'm very excited. Not because I have a rogue or am desperate to go out and collect sand(lol). With 1.12 finally coming to pass it means that pretty much the only thing in front of us is the expansion. I'm definitely in hurry up and get here mode. We've known about this thing for WAY to long and it's time it actually happened. Now I'm sure some will say "There's no guarantee that the expansion is next!" and that's true but there's also no guarantee that my new car won't get hit by a meteor today either. Think about it...this is the first time I can remember that we don't have (outside of the expansion) any information about what comes next. Even if there is a 1.13 (and I wouldn't be surprised if that happened) it's most likely a prep patch for the expansion. We know almost everything there is to know feature wise about the x-pac save for 2 things: 1) New talents and 2) new skills.

I'm not expecting much skill wise but I'm very curious to see if these new talents are THAT good. Good enough to convince pallys to go back into protection (that taunt is mighty tempting), good enough to create a balance to mortal strike/Death wish warriors. But I'm also curious to see what Affliction warlocks, Holy priests, Balance druids and their like get to possibly make them more viable.

In the same vein I'm hoping that beta is again as open as last time so that we can see if they finally start itemizing better for balance and feral druids (although I feel feral druids are a little better off than balance ones). I'm curious to see what gems are needed for gemcrafting and if they're just going to make it a skill worth getting post 60 or if they'll find some way to fit it in for the lower levels just starting out.

In general there's very little about the expansion that I'm not curious to see. I'm hoping to get some arena time in with my guildmates, definitely curious about the new raid dungeons, and can't wait to see the new bosses and new loot. I'll be curious to see how lvl 70 5 mans stack up against MC loot. How much of a hit is the original game going to take in the mudflation department. From the looks of things, my questions will likely soon have answers. I'm sure it'll be all the rage to talk about on this blog and many others.

From 0 to 60 in 3 page refreshes

2006-08-14T08:07:00.000-05:00

Sorry for little to no posting last week. It was dead all over. All the blogs I read were basically the same. In hindsight it was obviously the calm before the storm. There's about 3 or so things I want to touch on today so let's get started.

Blizzard released a metric ton of information about their expansion this weekend. First up is the obvious shrinking of raid sizes. Down from 40 the developers say all raid content for the foreseeable future will be between 10 and 25 man. Personally I'm in love with the change. I prefer smaller groups and hate them at the same time. If you group with a great group of people these smaller raids are definitely going to be up your alley. However, if you have someone who just can't hold their own (bad healer, tank who doesn't like to...well tank) it's going to be WAY more evident and it's going to be more of a problem. Blizzard appeared to realize that some of this is going to be somewhat of a problem so they've decided to push shamans to be more of a healing/dps hybrid by giving them bloodlust (burst DPS and probably some other stuff) and paladins more of a healing/off tanking hybrid (via a taunt, I'm guessing deep in the protection tree). I could write pages on what this means and how it will all shake out. My guess is you'll see less of the big guilds and more smaller friendlier guilds.

I've said for a while that WoW was stretched in too many directions. They tried to cater to the PVP, raid, casual, solo, weekend, Grandma, little kid crowds. Pretty much anyone and everyone who could type on a keyboard (or talk over vent). The problems arise when one realized that they all have different needs and if Blizzard could put out 4 types of dungeons (5, 15-20 40 man and a battleground) every time they put out one new area then, sure, everyone would likely to be happy. Problem is that's unfeasible and unwieldy. Seems that Blizzard figured out that they couldn't be all things to all people and it was in their best interest to pick a niche and fill it. Because of this we are seeing more of a push for smaller group casual content. All of the dungeons in BC (at least that we've seen so far) are winged. 2-3 wings for leveling and a raid wing. Sign me up. On top of this they're introducing scaling dungeons. That dungeon you did back at 62? You can do it again at level 70. Only this time you can designate before you go in that you want the hard version and you will get mobs and loot at level 70 instead of that for 62's. It was said that was possible to retrofit this into the old game. Let me save you a developer meeting: DO THIS! Put this in as soon as you can after the X-pac comes out. It effectively doubles your content and I know I'm not the only one that would love to do SM or deadmines at a tougher level.

Oh...Debuff limit goes from 16 to 40. Little treat from Eyonix on the forums for those that might have missed it. Dranei get something that resembles a war elephant and Blood Elves get a cockatrice. Sounds good, I was curious, but it's mostly aesthetics. Read among the various news articles another tidbit about jewel crafting in that they're going to have certain gems that are going to get bonuses based on how you slot other items. One might give a bonus for a certain number of one kind of color of gem or one might give a bonus the more different colors of gems you slot, etc. I'm actually really looking forward to gem crafting. I'm mainly taking it because I have this feeling I'm going to be wasting a lot of gems as I slot then overwrite them. (just cause) I loved the system in Diablo 2 and can't wait to see it repeated in WoW.

Huge PvP overhaul. Some good some bad. Tobold's thoughts on this matched my own pretty much 100% so I'll not repeat it here. Speaking of Tobold however, he had an interesting article on Everquest. I'm an old vet and really liked the game back in the day. I'm not really surprised by the news of declining subscriptions, I just wish for what I know will never be. And that is that they'll release the code to the public. They'll come up with some thing about Sony's IP (intellectual property) and making money off their copyright and what not. But in the time it'll take them to come up with all that stuff they could just as easily get the lawyers to draft some sort of user agreement up where you could use the EQ1 code for personal and private use and you had no ability to make money off it or infringe on EQ2 stuff, etc. I tried out a couple of the private servers and some of them were doing some really cool stuff with it. I wish they'd be permitted to come back, they were neat, small and friendly. I found it all just really cool to watch. So Brad, really. If you ever do get to the point of flipping the switch on EQ1, please, give it to the people! There are folks out there who were inspired by your world to create their own. Give them a chance and marvel at their creativity.

All's quiet on the southeastern front...

2006-08-04T11:17:00.000-05:00

Not much going on this week (in my world). More of my characters migrate to my new (gankless) server. I haven't gotten a chance to do any battlegrounds yet. I've signed up for a couple but either got busy or logged off before I got the invite. I'm hoping that'll change come 1.12 (guessing it hits next tuesday, we'll see if I'm right). Either way there's not much going on and work has been keeping me so busy that come evening time doing anything other than turning my mind off and turning WoW on has just seemed like too much of a chore.

Hopefully we'll here some more about 1.13 in the coming weeks. I'm really REALLY curious as to what's going to be in it as it is "supposedly" the last patch before the expansion. I'll believe it when I see it seeing as how the expansion isn't (that we know of) even in beta yet.

Suddenly the universe got bigger...

2006-07-26T07:27:00.000-05:00

So, if you play WoW and you haven't heard of the expansion yet, then you're more into the game than I am. Seriously, though, I'm starting to get impatient for news of beta. They keep dangling the thread over our head like a cat and it's owner and much like the cat, I'm getting bored and probably about to go off in search of the food bowl.

Interesting news came last week, when they announced that the factional classes (Paladin/Shaman) would be playable by the opposite faction. Now I've played horde a little bit but not much, so I'll spend most of my time examining this from an alliance perspective. I do think the Horde is getting a pretty big PvE boost by getting shaman. I'm curious if the Alliance will really see any boost in PvP (where I think a shaman's true colors are much more evident).

The idea that these two classes should be no longer faction specific is nothing new. I was (IMO) one of the first to suggest that it would clear up a lot of misconceptions from both camps on how godly or ungodly the classes were to their opponents. Shaman always seemed like tough opponents to me, while I never felt that my paladin was any god of the battlegrounds. (however I could and did use him to advantage in AB which I can see the advantage of 12 second delay with shield and consecration).

Honestly I'm still trying to figure out how a space faring race needs or uses shaman. The concept of shaman (to me) was always that of primitive or lower developed races' belief structure. But then again the whole "spaceship" idea in a fantasy MMO is kinda tough to pull off. They already had a method for transport via the portals, I wish they'd have stuck with that rather than introducing WoW's version of Shadows of Luclin.

Saw on the boards yesterday that several people have the notion that Blizzard is going to start focusing on small group content. I'll believe it when I see it but all things are possible I suppose. Someone claimed there was an interview where Kaplan (he thought) stated this had become their focus. Try as I might, I couldn't find any article as such. Karazhan seems to be a small group progressive instance but until we see the loot there's no way to be sure (where oh where art thou beta?).

All continues smoothly with my priest. Got my first Zul'Farrak group with him last night. One of my favorite instances and I got 2 upgrades out of it. Still hate the basilisk boss a ton but we found a tactic that seemed to work on the 2nd try. I hope I get to go again tonight as there's still a few things I wouldn't mind getting out of there.

Combat for the non-combatants...

2006-07-25T09:36:00.000-05:00

Last week was truly insane. I still feel like I'm recovering but things are starting to settle back down into a routine. I've gotten back into my priest who's coming along nicely. Also have been spending some time on my warlock who's also starting to see movement again after shaking the dust off. What's interesting is the priest is on my new PvE server and the warlock is on my old PvP server. The PvE is a low population server and the PvP is VERY high pop. They are quite diametrically opposed. However it's been a good reminder of my distaste for world PvP. Wow seems to have 2 (soon to be 3) forms of PvP in their game.

1) Battlegrounds - This is instanced and constructed form of PvP.
Pros:

Matchups are usually even in terms of people,
Objective based and rewarded both in faction with the BG as well as the player faction (alliance/horde)
They have a start and stop and when you're done you can just hearth or stop queuing

Cons:

Queues can take a while (and often do) but this might see some relief in 1.12 with shared across server BG's.
Gear mismatches (Tier 3 vs. blues from Strat/Scholo etc.) or teams using voice chat can lead to 1 sided fights.
Faction rewards require long hours of grinding

2) World PvP (forthcoming in 1.12)
Pros:

No wait time on PvP
Player faction reward (Horde/Alliance)
Some unnamed buff to be revealed at a later date

Cons

This will take place in zones where folks already quest and work for levels. Will be hard to avoid getting caught up in the fray
Gear will, again, be a factor. If they ever decide to put a way in to factor gear in BG's this will still remain a problem in world pvp.
The buff only affects small group instances (strat/AQ20) and the zone that the world pvp is in (EPL and Silithus). There's no telling how long this buff will be, but it's unlikely to last more than 1-2 hours at most. (ie no buffing then running to a 40 man instance)

3) Random PvP - Most know this form of PvP as Ganking.

I don't really see any pro's to this sort of thing. Most open PvP revolves around one side or another having a clear advantage, is most common in lower level zones (Redridge, duskwood, Tarren Mill (I'd say Barrens, but that's non-contested for Hordies which is a whole other blog post)) and usually is anything other than "honorable". Blizzard clearly supports this ganking mentality with their hands off approach to PvP in the world and is unlikely to change any time soon. So if a level 60 wants to come roll into redridge and 1 shot folks coming across the bridge out of town in 1's and 2's he's free to do it all day long. For some reason Blizzard thinks that every sub 60 has some bored level 60 friends just hanging around with nothing better to do than even out the odds. Sorry, not likely. So I'm encouraged to drag out my level 60 and spend 30 to 60 minutes chasing the guy out of the zone just so I can go spend the remaining 15 minutes of my playtime in peace.

When world PvP first got implemented the players begged in the forums for them to implement some sort of anti-griefing (read corpse camping) code into the game so that 60's had an active investment in NOT killing players that had no chance agaisnt them. Their response was to input civilian NPC's in the game that (to my knowledge) no one has been really all that interested/happy about.

I find it interesting that Blizzard seems to put all this effort into structured PvP (BG's and world pvp objectives) yet they allow this random mob mentality pvp to continue to exist.

After thinking about this for quite a while, I'm hard pressed to figure out why one would really want to play on a PvP server. You already have access to the BG's and world pvp (through flagging) on the PvE servers, why bother with random pvp fights that are seldom fair or interesting (5 60's on 1 level 30 at nessingways is hardly competitive or "honorable"). I'm actually curious as to why folks still like to play on PvP servers. Is it the adrenaline rush like that of walking through a rough neighborhood in your short skirt and high heels?

I'm sure there are folks that do like the competitive nature of it all. I, however, am more than glad to leave the pointless random interval corpse retrievals in the past and still enjoy the occasional Alterac Valley run.

Real Life Conspiracy Theories are real...

2006-07-18T12:48:00.000-05:00

So Real Life is trying to keep me from playing WoW this week, and it's doing a hell of a job. Being out of contact means that I'm out of touch with what's going on. Didn't even realize till lunch time today that 1.12 had been pushed to the test realm in WoW. I'm in danger of losing my already tenuous status as a powergamer. I'm enjoying my PvP free experience. I'd like to do another post about it, and commenting on PvP as a whole in WoW later on this week. Time permitting. We'll see...

Still haven't picked up a secondary game, but considering all that's going on right now that probably won't happen for a few weeks. Maybe something new will release...

The call went out...

2006-07-11T13:59:00.000-05:00

I haven't played City of Villians in a month or so. (shortly after I7 was released). I have peaks and valleys with that game, apparently I'm in a valley at the moment. So on that note, I'm thinking aobut trying out some other games (WoW's not going anywhere, I mean aside from that). So I'm looking at either picking up Guild Wars: Factions, restarting my (very) old Horizons account, trying out the Everquest Progression server or something new. Anyone have any suggestions?

For my convenience, a change of address...

2006-07-11T10:46:00.000-05:00

I've made a big decision in my life. I'm moving. This move, however, is not one in the real world but one in the virtual. I'm relocating my characters from my PvP server to a PvE server. I started thinking about PvP in WoW and what a PvP server offers me over PvE. I honestly couldn't think of one good reason not to move. Every time I attacked or was attacked (outside of BG's) in PvP there was always an advantage one way or another that made the outcome inevitable. I was with a group of people who were just "out for blood" or the Horde guy was 2x my level. I can count on one hand the number of times that combat was actually "Honorable". And I realized that if I want that experience I can still get it on a PvE server (assuming world PVP works out the way that blizzard seems to hint it will) with new and improved 25% less ganking. I'm looking forward to leveling my toons in Stranglethorn Vale without having to worry that some bored level 60 is going to corpse camp me or that I'll waste an evening swapping over to my level 60 and trading blows with the guy all over the zone. It's pointless and after the first couple of kills a completely unrewarding waste of time.

Should be an interesting change of pace...

My view takes 2 steps to the right...

2006-07-06T07:05:00.000-05:00

So I came back from a long weekend vacation and am flipping through my wow characters (I have 8) catching up on email, trying to decide what to do. I notice in the LFG channel that someone is doing a PUG Onyxia run. Now PUG raids have been running off and on on my server for a while but lately I've noticed that there have been more and more PUG's. Most seem to be Ony, ZG and AQ20. I'm assuming it's because their shorter than say MC and don't have the strict gear and co-ordination requirements of BWL. Anyway, I've had my share of bad PUGs in places like Scholo, Strat and the like so I usually just don't even pay attention to PUG raid announcements. Something caught my eye about it though and I decided to haul out my resto druid and just check this out for myself. They were almost full when I got in so I just took off. Being the jaded person I am, I had a pool going in my guild for how many of the PUG'ers wouldn't have an Ony key. Surprisingly everyone did. It was about then I started to suspect that I might have too narrow a view of this encounter. Took a bit to get everyone there and buff up but not too much longer than in one of my regular guild runs. We cruise through the 4 or so trash mobs and solidly hand Ony her butt on a silver platter. Bonus to this story is my druid got his Stormrage helm! Not to bad for an hour and a half of time investment. Now it wasn't all champagne and roses. There were a few folks I was annoyed with, the usual suspects of PUG'ing as it were. The "Bossy know it all" who seems to be the first to die, the "Not really taking it seriously and seems to be suspiciously near the whelp cave when we get 2 or 3 unexpected whelps" but overall it was a great run.

So riding this PUG high, I decided to attend a PUG AQ20 later in the evening. The crowd was mostly from 1 guild, but there were about 3 or so other guilds represented. This run we didn't get as far but I found the folks far more pleasant to be around. I got a no drop quest piece for cenarion circle armor but we wiped on the Rajaxx encounter. Disappointing in that many of the PUG'ers kept leaving. More what I expected out of a PUG raid but the folks leading it were really nice so it made it more tolerable.

All in all my opinion of PUGs went up a couple notches that day. Made me think, I might actually go do some from time to time when my guild's not doing anything.

By the time this publishes, I'll be writing a new post...

2006-06-28T06:49:00.000-05:00

Lag. All online gamers have experienced it. All game developers have tried to squash it. I'm curious as to what the threshold is on when it's "unacceptable". For instance: My server (Magtheridon-US) was, for the longest time, a sheet of bedrock. I'd watch all the other servers crumbling and I'd feel bad. But then I'd log into my WoW server and forget about them (kinda).

Mag was an early release server that just, for one reason or another, never got hit by the lag bug. Then, about 3 - 4 weeks ago around 7pm every night, consistently, we'd suddenly get crippling lag. The kind that would make it almost impossible to play. Raids started getting canceled because we'd wipe on bosses we had on farm status and a general feeling of discomfort and anger started setting in all over my guild. Harsh words about blizzard, that might previously been mutter over a muted microphone were suddenly shouted over vent. On more than one occasion I sent my son off on some imagined "necessary" errand because the talk was a little beyond the usually PG-13 barrier.

So I was mildly amused to finally see another guild start a thread in the general forums about our problem. Then spent the next few days being not surprised that it got completely ignored. I assume we'll eventually be moved to the Mecca of WoW that is new server hardware. I'm curious if any of the folks that have been transferred yet have any reassurances that it did solve their problems. Either way I continue to suffer through but I'm curious how our guild is going to survive. They've talked about taking advantage of the server transfer but I see that ours is not one of the blessed few early participants and who knows how long it's going to take for ours to open up to transfer or if the server we wish to move to will be open at that point. Good chance if ours opened soon, that the server we want to move to will still be waiting to do transfers.

On a side note, I haven't gotten much writing done this week. I've been, for some unfathomable reason, reading transcripts of the show Veronica Mars. I'm very much thinking I need to go buy this on DVD. Turned out to be a great little mystery show. I'm thinking I'm going to take a notebook w/ me this weekend and see if I can get some work done over the extended holiday.

Enjoy the BBQ'ing. And break out the grill even if you aren't celebrating the 4th. Hamburgers taste so much better once they've been cooked over charcoal!

Notes from all over...

2006-06-22T07:05:00.000-05:00

So much news everwhere this week...just thought I'd do snapshot/5 second commentary on a variety of things:

EA buys Mythic: This is a bad idea from a player standpoint and a good idea from an investor standpoint. Worried about Warhammer (which IMO was showing much promise). Hopefully if EA feels the need to get involved they do it in a Vivendi way and not the usual EA way. I'm not very hopeful for that though.

Cross Server Battlegrounds in WoW: Saw it coming a mile away. Problem I have is this: If every server has a horde deficiency (Mag seems to have a decent amount but lately they don't seem to be doing much BG's outside of WSG) then tying 10 servers together just means you have 10x the number of alliance guys waitng for 5 or so horde players to decide they need AV or AB faction. Let alliance queue up against each other. Maybe then all us alliance can find out how hard it is to kill paladins.

PS3: Read the other day that the PS3 was going to be over one grand in europe. Not sure why Sony is trying to hard to ruin this machine. More power to em I say.

Lord of the Rings Online: Beta apps started this week. I want to be excited about this game but am having a hard time. Hoping I get in so they can show me WHY I should be excited.

Wow 1.11 released: All this new Argent dawn stuff hits the game and I can't get a Strat/Scholo group to save my life. I'm confused and my paladin is lacking gear. My guild doesn't help much because they don't have 13 thousand alts needing gear and are mostly uninterested in lvl 60 dungeons. This makes me a sad panda. On the other hand there were a boat load of really good additions to the game in this one.

Being a Father on Father's day

2006-06-19T08:42:00.000-05:00

So I'm going to break my rules here a bit. This blog, for the most part, serves two purposes for me.
1) To talk about the MMO's I'm currently playing
2) To talk about my writing in attempt to get me to do more of it.

I try hard to stick to those two rules. However, today I'm going to split off a bit here. Yesterday was Father's Day and, as I'm the father or 4 boys, I spent pretty much the whole day with them. We ended it by going to see Cars. I bring this up because I wanted to share that, while it IS indeed a kids movie, it's also a great piece of technological beauty. I write this to encourage you to go see a great example of what computers can do now a days. The story itself was passable but, being a kids movie, ultimately predictable. There were some funny moments but what really clinched it for me was just how beautiful it was to watch.

Now that that's out of the way I did have a 3 day weekend so I spent some time in City of villains, got 26 on my mastermind and got some walking tank. He's huge and in charge. I call my new robot Lee Iacocca.

Later that day, the wife, my friend and I tried out Dungeons and Dragons online (free 7 day trial). My thoughts on this haven't really changed much since beta:

1) Visually pretty good
2) Hard to follow mobs because they move around a bit
3) Wouldn't be fun for me if I wasn't in a group of folks I know in real life
4) Not worth $15 a month. $9.99? Maybe, but not $15. I just don't think it's up to the same bar as the other top of the line guys in the field. Built in voice chat is nice though.

Also went to MC with my guild this weekend. Got 3 upgrades. (1 I should have passed on, in retrospect, but it was still and upgrade so I was pleased) While I continue to attend I still have to say that I long for the days of 5 man dungeons. It's pretty sad when I can go AFK during a raid and nobody even knows I'm gone. Gives you a real sense of how 100 pennies can make a dollar.

I'm of two wallets on this one...

2006-06-13T07:17:00.000-05:00

So I listened to a very, very close friend of mine this weekend talk about buying gold. She is a mother of multiple children and likes to raid. She also likes to spend time with her family. While listening to her talk about how she gets 3-4 nights a week to raid. That, after a few months of doing Strat/Scholo/etc. that this was the only real progression left open to her in the game she loves, she found it hard to keep up w/ repairs, potions (that were required by her guild), and general fees that aren't really advertised on the box. She'd turned to buying small sums of gold here and there every so often. Now by small sums I am to mean, 500 or so gold every few months to cover buying herbs (for the record she's a 300 herbalist) for potions (like fire protection potions), large repair bills during and after learning new encounters and the like.

I've never been much of an opponent of the actual trade of virtual money, so long as it's obtained legitimately. I do have issues with hacking, soloing mobs that are, for your level, obviously not meant to be solo'd, explointing, etc. The whole thing kinda got me thinking. Blizzard, to me, has really been seeming to put forth the message that they want 60's to raid or PvP. (more or less) There are a limited number of level 60 instances for both raiders and non raiders. While the ratio is something like 10 to 5 in favor of raiders, it's more like apples to oranges content when you realize 1 5/10 man takes 3 hours while a 40 man (that's not on farm status) can take upwards of 5 or more hours (and still not be successful if you don't really know the content or have somebody mucking things up).

Now blizzard doesn't set any hard and fast rules about how "You must spend 5 days a week in a raid instance or you will not progress" but as I've covered in my previous post (somewhat) if a guild claims to be a raiding guild and doesn't provide an abundance of opportunities to do such, there's very little now a days keeping a player tied down to one guild. Sense of commitment or community certainly isn't going to do it. So to keep things together, most guild leaders I've run into push hard for attendance to every raid. They'd rather turn folks away than have not enough show up and wipe on a mob that (they assume) was on farm status 3 times in one night. In doing so this means that two things must happen.

Either they raid all the time and buy the funds needed to keep raiding almost constantly or you must recruit people and cycle them around so people have time to farm for money for repair and support. However, in doing that it means that to "fully gear up" for the next tier of dungeon a guild has to spend twice the amount of time running the same dungeon. A prospect that I'd think most raiders agree isn't any more fun than running Scholomance in your sleep for the five thousandth time.

So what do we make of all this? Is it cheating to pay someone to do grind your not willing to do? Sure you could go out and run through Scarlet monastery 15 times to get the gold to cover next months repair bill + reagents (or farm the reagents yourself by running around 1 or 2 zones over and over till you have 5 stacks of 2 different kinds of herbs). But honestly, who thinks that's fun? What happens when a 1-2 thousand gold mount becomes required to get to the next level of content? I mean if the gold has to be generated anyway (either by yourself or someone who's job is just doing the mind numbing part) is there really any impact on the economy? Is this a shortfall of Blizzard in not seeing the career raiders needs? Or not supplying the appropriate amount of cash inside a raid instance? I honestly find it interesting that every humanoid mob (and some non-humanoids) in the game supplies a cash drop but in MC suddenly every humanoid is dead broke. Apparently Ragnaros is a true Communist.

--------------------------
On a side note work suddenly got busy so my writing's on hold. I'm hoping to get some more knocked out on my day off this week. We'll see how it goes. I'm also hoping to have a sample to post soon to at least show the fruits of my labors. As I said before, we'll see how it goes.

What it's all about...

2006-06-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

So I'm not expecting to get much of anything done this weekend. See, it's geekfest time! Sounds like an uber nerd convention you say? Well it's more like all of my RL friends getting together under one roof to consume stupid amounts of caffeine and spend the day fragging and smack talking each other. We try to do this once or twice a year (cause packing up your gear is a pain in the butt). It's always a good experience but I'm always left wiped the next day. This time around we're going retro. Playing some Battlefield: Vietnam, Empire Earth (1 not 2) and probably some Star Wars Battlefront (ok, that one's not really retro but Hey! It's Star Wars!)

So all things go to the back burner this weekend and I get to see how rusty I am at navigating the Hochi Min trail. (I'm sure I spelled that wrong sorry to my Vietnamese reader base there)

See you all next week!

I know we've been through thick and thin but these guys actually have l33t in their name...

2006-06-08T06:37:00.000-05:00

Ok...so I'm finally getting around to it. (or at least I'm forcing myself to get around to it)

I've been playing MMO's for quite some time now (MMO = online game where thousands play in the same sandbox). I remember my Everquest days quite fondly. I was in a smallish guild (around 40 or so people, 20 or so online regularly) that was a very tight family. The guild leader would call me at my house for PC troubleshooting advice. My wife had a close friend in Montanna. We spent a good deal of time with these guys and even though we weren't killing Gods or Dragons we actually had good times just doing small things together. Sure some folks came and went, most that left though, usually came back because we all cared pretty deeply about each other. Before you all start thinking this was some only orgy or some hippy love in, I'll say this. We were a family. When we got in real life financial trouble, one of the guild members actually sent us money at christmas time so we could buy our kids a few presents. Unasked, out of the goodness of their heart, they put a check in the mail. Would your guild mates do that for you?

That was the good old days. What's interesting is the contrast, by comparison, to what I see in World of Warcraft today. We just lost a member this weekend to another raiding guild. Mind you our guild is about to start the next teir of raiding in probably a week or two. The person that left will get probably a 2 week jump on gear. However, he'd been in a position of power in our guild and I'm left to wonder if he really got that much of a leg up in his new guild. Guild loyalty now a days is something to laugh about or "take seriously until you've done the end 5 or so instances about 5 million times and need a gear increase or you're going to just quit because your bored." I've been there, alts are my last resort. But is it just the fast paced nature of WoW that causes this? Is it the lack of end game options? I played EQ for 4.5 years. Never got to the end level, never ran out of things to do. In WoW I have 3 (probably 4 or more by months end) 60's and have run through all but 2 instances in the game. I'd kill for solo or small group content that wasn't mind numbingly repetitive, rather than the mob mentality raiding game. And maybe that's it, people leave for better chances at progressing their character, but honestly, I can't see fighting tooth and nail beside folks for so long, just to abandon them at the drop of a hat. I say this knowing that I too left my guild for a while. I had different ideas about things (still do) but at the behest of my wife's claims that we never played together anymore I went back. Honestly, if I'm going to spend time playing in the deep end of the wow pool, I think I'd rather do it with the friends I came up with in WoW.

On a side note, my writing has fallen by the wayside... I'm hoping to correct that today, we'll see how it goes. Hopeing to cross over the 10,000 word mark by this time next week.

You do the work, I'll reap the rewards...

2006-06-06T08:50:00.000-05:00

So the guild I'm in beat Ragnaros this weekend (last boss in the first 40 man raid instance). I wasn't there to see it because of family obligations (and then at the last minute kidney stones ) Now truth be told, I don't really like raid content. I find that my impact is minimal most of the time and truth be told, I like the cozyness and difficulty of 5 man stuff. Problem is, you run UBRS 50 times and it tends to get a little old. I wait eagerly for more 5 man stuff that Blizz keeps promising will come (I know, I'm a sucker) .

So anyway, the guild drops Rag. Which is great! I'm glad they did it. I know this was a big stepping stone for them. But I look at it and I'm only reminded that I find MC to be boring as all get out. Why do I do it? Mostly because there's little else for me to do at this point outside of alts. That and the fact that my wife seems to get a kick out of raiding. So I go, and I push my 3 or so buttons and the mob (usually) dies and I continue to wonder where this small group content is and why I keep paying to go to work after I get home from work...

Slow progress is better than a poke in the eye...

2006-05-31T12:17:00.000-05:00

Got some writing done yesterday. Not pages and pages worth but I consider any words put on page, at this point, to be a very positive thing. So I rewarded myself with some WoW time and got in on the second half of a Zul'Gurub run. Downed the Tiger and Panther bosses. Both tough fights. It's part of the reason I like ZG/AQ20. They're extremely challenging. I just wish their loot tables were a bit better off. Most of MC is a cake by comparison. Just MC has better equipment so people tend to spend their time there.

I'm hoping to get a bit more written today. I'm still in the first act which is all setup. I'm plowing ahead and will hopefully get to the action part soon. Work still crazy so that write up is going to get delayed again. I'm putting this off so much that it must seem like some epic piece. It's more of an observation piece. I'm not even sure I know the why or how to's of it. But then again, that's what most of my posts here are about.

A return, and a bit of rambling

2006-05-30T13:23:00.000-05:00

Wow...not that far along in my blog and already I'm skipping days. See what a slacker I am? And suddenly the audience understood why I could never complete a writing project.

Seriously though, I got absolutly NO writing done this weekend. Which honestly makes me sad. However, I had the unusual opportunity to raid a lot this weekend and the selfish slug in me took over. So I killed Ony 2x, and cleaned out MC (except for rag) with my wife's guild. (I say it's her guild because I raid only to spend online time with her.

However today has yielded some fruit. I have the 2nd chapter of my fanfic done. (or mostly done) For those of you following along, yes I did miss the deadline. However I've decided that there's a story here to tell and when I'm done I'll still post it up on the RP forums at blizzplanet just so everyone can see it.

I told myself that I wouldn't let myself play wow tonight unless I got the 2nd chapter of my story done so I have to keep this short so I can get my work (both real work and writing work) done. I will, however, get to that article I wanted to write about Guilds "then and now": A retrospective. Which will be a work of art of such moving wordplay that I'll surely win the pulitzer prize of blogging. If only they had a pulizter prize of blogging...

And now for something totally different...

2006-05-23T09:17:00.000-05:00

I try to keep this about the games I play and my writing (I wish it was more about my writing, honestly...need to spend more time doing it)

I'm an entertainment junkie. Anyone who knows me knows that fact very well. I don't just like games, movies, RPG's, etc. I can't just open a box and enjoy it. I have to live it. I can tell you more about the lead designers of most games than I can about the games themselves. I can tell you all about how much difficulty Whedon had getting Serenity (the movie, Firefly was the TV show) made and what characters he likes the most (stupid River...why can't there be more love for Kaylee?!?)

Anyway, I was reading a column on cinescape today and looking over the comments section brought back some interesting thoughts that have been swimming through my head about movies over the last year or so. In particular I've been trying to mull over this single question: Are movies getting dumber, or are Critics getting too snobbish for them. I used to love Aintitcoolnews. I mean it was a site run by geeks to just loved watching films. Sure they still watch films but most of them now are too busy to post or deal w/ the site. So we've got a new group of people. Not that their bad, just they're not the people that attracted me to the site in the first place. So I find myself reading it less and less. Chud? I'm tired of hearing about some of the writers political positions. Cinescape? Meh...In my opinion it's kind of lean. I feel like there's probably more in the magazine but I'm there to read the website. I still get some good nuggets from time to time but it's sort of hit and miss.

Often times I find myself at odds with the communities that surround these sites anyways. Most of them live to just diss movies before they've even seen them. (I'm talking to you Magnoliafan69) I'd rather see a community that wants (no NEEDS) to see a movie be good. For example, for months after Brett Ratner took over directing X3, all I saw from the throngs of movie aficionados was how X3 was going to suck and why didn't Ratner just kill himself. Sure I had that feeling too, but I wanted, no needed, it to be a good film. I grew up reading X-men comics. I love the franchise. They're at a crucial stage of telling the story of the Dark Phoenix. (granted it didn't follow the comics but it was an entertaining ride getting there so I forgave them) So here I set, 4 days before it opens and the critics are suddenly "It's not bad, not great, but not bad. So ok, general consensus is "Not great, but passable." That's a far cry from the train wreck that everyone was just sure was coming.

So...the point? Why is everyone so eager for movies they should want to succeed, to fail? Sure you may not like any movies Ratner has done in the past. (sticking to the X3 analogy) However, can't you hold out hope that this will be his shining star? Can't we keep it in perspective that he's not the only one working on the project and that the producers, writers (hey it happens occasionally) and what not have some stake in the film and want it to be cool too?

I know, crazy me for trying to inject reasoning and thought into mob mentality.

Anyway, back tomorrow with more gaming stuff. Thinking I'll do an article on yesteryear and what happened to guild loyalty. Catch ya then!

And after 20 years, he woke up...

2006-05-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

Birthday today + super busy at work = no post. With the weekend coming I hope to finish up my wow fanfic (yeah, right) tomorrow then enjoy some nice WoW + CoV time. See you all next week.

Wife got me some canvas at the store on Tuesday. Might try my hand at painting this weekend. I'll see if I can take a pic of the horrendous results.

Slim Pickens

2006-05-16T06:41:00.000-05:00

Not much on my mind today. Couldn't log into WoW last night. I'd complain about their lackluster authentication servers but really, that horse has been beaten so many times other horse's children are starting to feel it. So, instead, I tooled aroud CoV for a while, read through some of my past storylines (read: completed quests). The stories to this game are actually pretty impressive, just I think they need to make the end bosses stand out more, feel more "I'm the end guy!!!"-ish.

I got some real writing done for the contest yesterday...Annnd then I lasped into that usual micromanagement thing I do w/ my work. So I set it aside and plan to return to it today. I've got until June 1st to submit, so here's hoping I get it done.

...And in other news...

2006-05-15T08:19:00.000-05:00

I don't usually post twice but I didn't want to muddy my last post with my other musings of the weekend. I was playing City of Villians this weekend on my Mastermind (Robots... why no pirates??) Anyway, to the point, I tend to solo in that game as a way to just pass the time, and I ended up with a mission with an elite boss in it. Me and my 5 cronies took him to the cleaners. I felt mighty after having defeated all the goody two shoed longbow...including this guy all by myself. I didn't need anybody. My team of crack assassins were able to slip in, take out the target and slip out. If by slipping you mean using a sledgehammer in a china shop. We wiped the whole place out and left nothing but the burning hulk of an oil rig to show we were there. muhahaha!

Sorry, let myself get carried away there. In CoV news, those mayhem missions can't get here soon enough.

Still didn't get much written this week but found a few new songs that got the ol' creative juices flowing. Hoping that it bears fruit this week. Blizzplanet is running a short story contest. I'm thinking about entering it. More details as news develops.

When two different equations = same answer

2006-05-15T08:01:00.000-05:00

I'm constantly returning in WoW to the same question. Why can't two different classes do the same job? On release I looked at the talent trees and (to me) it seemed obvious that the initial idea behind the talent trees was to allow one class to take on different roles based on where they spent their points. Some trees (and thusly roles) were better than others. Most feel that a shadow spec'd priest is a very capable damage dealer. Many feral druids would argue that they can tank almost as good as (or as good as if they could get some +def) a warrior. What I find interesting, then, is the seemingly unending desire for wow to then pigeon hole every class to a specific job rather than exanding upon the idea that rather than picking a set of talents for a job that you fall back on the same tired out idea of "I pick my role and therefore am stuck doing one thing for the rest of his onlife". Why not let a paladin tank? Just set it up so that if he wants to be a dependable tank then ALL of his mana must be devoted to tanking. Rather than pigeonholing a mage into one damage type why not break his talent trees up into "Control"(focusing on crowd managing aspects), AOE, and single target talents.

Allow different classes to overlap and do things in different ways. Make all classes able to upgrade their armor through talents. Not everyone can wear plate obviously but allow trade offs Fine mr. mage, you can wear leather but all of your spells suffer a 5% degradation to effectiveness. Paladin, you can wear plate, but you have to go down the tanking tree to do it!

Which brings me to another issue, rather than moving all these talents into trainable positions why not do the opposite. Want to heal good as a druid? Start them out with Regrowth as their only heal then make them move points to the resto tree to get healing touch and rejuv heals. Rather than putting a mez at the end of the paladins damage tree, give them a 10-15% boost to melee damage while sacrificing 5-10% of their mana pool (or something that would bring them closer to a fury warrior or rogue, they chose the melee damage tree...let them compete!!!). My imagined mage AOE tree would allow them to go from say having one AOE (Arcane explosion for example) to having blizzard, then frost nova then Blast Wave. Allow talent points to expand your role choices not limit them as they currently do.

Damn the playerbase, I want 100 men in a phone booth!

2006-05-12T07:08:00.000-05:00

Read a great post over at Tobold's blog today. (He has some really thoughtful articles, I can't recommend his site enough) Anyway, I'd seen the dungeon numbers back during Blizzcon and the implication of what they said just floated on by me. Seemed like high numbers, and it never dawned on me to actually add those numbers up and see that it amounted to crap as far as total subscribers was concerned. This keeps bringing me back to the same question when it comes to WoW. If your customers overwhelmingly ask for red widgets and you keep producing blue ones, how much longer do you think you're going to keep your customers?

Now with MMO's the answer is longer than average because people become invested in their characters. I've been disenfranchised with WoW for quite a while now. It's been a long time since Dire Maul was introduced. I mainly play these days to keep the wife happy. If they'd honestly start looking at what their roots were, what had me and many like me glued to their monitors in beta, they'd see that we're not interested in raid content. If Vanguard ever gets it's developing head out of it's ass (according to rumors) and gets a solid hardcore raiding game up and running my prediction is that the few raiders WoW has will abandon ship faster than a supermodel leaving a party after all the coke has been snorted. Point is, WoW's strength is it's from the hip MMO lite playstyle. 1-59.9 is a stronger game 5x over than it's 60+ raid content. Why not focus on your strengths?

Now I know it takes a while to do a whole instance up, but at least give us some teasers. Truthfully though, I think just doing 5 man instances isn't going to be the end all, be all answer. They've got to shift the whole mentality of what they're doing. Instances are cool and all (I do love them) but it's story and mechanics as well.

For example, why not add mechanics to the game to allow quests to be done by guilds? It requires you to complete several steps in no particular order. Say an NPC standing, or arriving, in a guild hall (housing is WAY overdue guys) saying that he's found evidence of an and needs several pieces of an ancient artifact in order to beat it. To complete this quest he'll need this laundry list of things. Some of them are crafted (maybe new recipes can be added here) some come from old dungeons, some from a new one. Measure out the quest to take 3 weeks of hard play to complete with rewards along the way so players feel like they're being rewarded as they do the quest. Some can be cosmetic (banners, furniture and whatnot for the guild house) some can be in the form of armor/weapons doled out in some fair manner so you can't have greifing (GL awards them or something like that). In the end after it's completed you could have some event sort of thing scaled to the size of people that show up to the final event. 5 people show up you have 2-4 regular mobs (maybe in a series of waves) with a boss, or you can have a full 40 show up and have this grand battle. See? This isn't hard. The above example was just off the top of my head. Blizzard does this for a living, you'd think they could come up with something 10x better than this.

Just makes me sad to see a potentially great game get watered down into the same old MMO that we've seen for years now. Either way they'll get my money for a while longer, until my wife gets tired of raiding MC.

On a different note, I did get some writing done yesterday. Made me happy even though it was relatively small amount done. I'm hoping to add some more to it today. Maybe a chapter or two. I know what needs to be written it's just getting the dialog on paper to say what I have envisioned in my head. Same crap, different day. But as long as I write a little something every day then at least I'm getting myself into the habit of writing. Next hurdle is "writing even when I don't want to write". I think I can, I think I can...

2006-05-09T11:31:00.000-05:00

In training this week...sorry about slim updates. Hurt my knee this weekend so I'm limping along. Curiously waiting E3 updates about WoW. I'm kinda beating myself up as well for getting no writing done this week. I'll have a full post tomorrow.

Once I got the 2nd stick, I made fire!

2006-05-04T07:28:00.000-05:00

So I sucked it up and logged into Seed again last night. In 24 hours, two major things happened: Repair jobs I could do appeared and NPC's showed up. Pretty impressive on the surface, but as I understand it, both of these worked in beta so it probably needed just a small tweak to get them jumpstarted. However, I don't want to downplay this. In 24 hours they went from "I can't do anything but move and talk" to "Hey, neat, I got something accomplished!" Which makes me smile. But then the game crashed and I frowned a bit and waited the usual 5 minutes for it to come back up. (most of the downtimes are usually short)

Honestly? I can deal w/ the crashes. I've played most of the other MMO's (both alive and retired) and they've all had this issue. Not with the same frequency but these guys are a 20-ish man team. I'm just impressed they actually got the game out the door in 2.5 years semi-working. So given that I'm anxious to see what they can do w/ another 24 hours.

On a "slightly to the side" note: I found the seed community to be rather interesting. Even the detractors are often calm, reasoning, and post with some reasonable arguments. In game I found everyone there to be quite nice. Unlike some other games I play (ex. HAHA I stole your nodezorz!)

Tomorrow = Day off...I traditionally don't surf much while not at work (amazing I know). Planning to get some time in the morning working on my (hopefully soon to be published) book. While I'm dreaming about it being published, I'd also like one million dollars please. Seriously though, I'm hoping to get some time in the afternoon to get more of a view of Seed then maybe log some WoW time in w/ the wife. Might turn into Oblivion or Battlefront 2 if she ends up having a raid however. First and foremost I'm spending 4 hours on the book tomorrow. <--Serious Face

It wants to be more than the sum of its parts...

2006-05-03T07:57:00.003-05:00

So I beta'd this new virtual world called Seed last night. I say virtual world because it is a game but not in the traditional sense. Anyway, the point being that the company is off to a rough start. Investors forced the developers to push the product out early. At least that's what the developers claim. At this point, I see no reason to refute those claims. This isn't the first MMO that seems that way, or makes those claims. However, I've seldom seen a game in quite this amount of disrepair. Game crashes and restarts are to be expected of just about any new MMO. However the game is suffering from something I've rarely seen in that there's no "rats" to kill.

Now those of you familiar with the "killing of rats" metaphor from MMO's understand what I'm talking about, others will require this explanation. Traditionally in MMO's you start out as a weak hero. You cut your way through X amount of rats and gain levels and take on bigger things. Seed isn't a level based game as such but you have to "Kill rats" by way of fixing stuff that's broken to gain money to do just about anything else. Problem is, the stuff that's broken can't currently be repaired. So basically the game has turned into a game of walk around and talk (for about 10 minutes before the game crashes)

There's all the traditional questions raised of "Did they know this was going to happen before launch? Is this intentional? Why do you hate me O God's of Seed? Etc. I personally wonder if they even knew about this and if so why wasn't it communicated better to the upper echelons and the release date held off. The software is only downloadable and free so it's not like they had marketing managers shouting that they couldn't recall 100,000 copies of the game.

Oh well, what's done is done. I honestly like the premise of the game and hope that they pull it together before my 10 weeks are up. I'd like to see the game succeed. They have a great core community, developers who seem to communicate well and a wonderful concept for a virtual world.

Plan 8.5 from Innerspace

2006-05-02T13:58:00.000-05:00

So here's my blog...All great minds have to start somewhere, all inferior minds have to start somewhere as well, it just takes us longer to get where we're going. Guess this is as good a start as any. I intend to use this space (mostly) to ramble on about my 2 favorite past times. Gaming, and my writing. The former will never earn me any money. Neither will the latter, but at least I end up with something non-virtual after I'm done with it. However at this point in my life, I've been about 10x more successful as a gamer. I'm hoping this blog will help me reverse that order.